Fruit Salad
Mix one cup of diced oranges, one cup of diced apples, one cup of diced bananas and half a cup of stoned cherries. Any fruit may be combined as, grapes cut and seeded, grapefruit diced, oranges and berries. Put in a bowl and pour over them a French dressing. Serve cold.
A plain fruit salad from the era when a salad meant something dressed, not something sweetened. The only real decision is the dressing.
- French dressing, 1910s senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means oil and vinegar (or lemon juice) with salt, roughly three parts oil to one part acid. On fruit, use a mild oil and lemon juice, and go light.
- If you want it sweetPeriod cookbooks also give boiled or cooked mayonnaise-type dressings for fruit salad, or simply a little sugar and citrus juice. Either is a defensible substitute if a vinaigrette on bananas does not appeal.
- YieldAbout three and a half cups of fruit, which serves four as a side salad or six as part of a larger meal.
- Order of cuttingDice the apples and bananas last and toss them in the orange juice released during dicing. Both brown within minutes of exposure to air.
- Cherries"Stoned" means pitted. Fresh sweet cherries were a short summer item; canned or jarred cherries in syrup will work but should be drained well or they will thin the dressing.
- GrapefruitGrapefruit interacts with a number of prescription medications. Worth knowing before using it as the substitution the recipe invites.
- ServingChill the fruit, but dress it just before it goes to the table. Left to stand, the salt and acid draw juice out and the salad sits in a watery pool.
Fruit salad dressed with oil and vinegar looks odd now, but it made sense in a period when the salad course was defined by its dressing rather than by its sweetness. Cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s often put French dressing over grapefruit, oranges and bananas.