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Frozen Fruit Salad No. 1
2 rings pineapple 2 halves pears 4 halves peaches 1/2 teaspoon gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water 1/3 cup each of pineapple and peach juice 1/2 cup Maraschino cherries 1/4 cup whipped cream 1/4 cup mayonnaise Cut down rings of pineapple to fit tray of electric refrigerator. Place rings in bottom of tray, with half pear on top. Next place two sections of peaches and sprinkle the cherries, chopped, over top. Soak gelatine in gold water, dissolve in the boiling fruit juice. Pour over the fruit in tray. Place in electric refrigerator and freeze 5 hours. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves and garnish with thoroughly blended whipped cream and mayonnaise. Serves 4.
A 1930s refrigerator-tray salad, built in layers and frozen solid rather than churned. Everything here comes from cans, and the method assumes the shallow metal ice tray of an early electric refrigerator.
- The fruit is cannedPineapple rings, pear halves and peach halves all mean canned fruit in syrup — that is also where the third-cup each of pineapple and peach juice comes from. Fresh fruit will not layer as neatly and fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will keep the gelatine from setting.
- The traySubstitute a small loaf pan or a straight-sided freezer-safe dish about 8 by 4 inches, lined with plastic wrap or parchment so the block lifts out. Cutting the pineapple rings down to fit is simply trimming them to the width of the vessel.
- Gelatine, and why so littleHalf a teaspoon in roughly two-thirds cup of juice gives a very soft set — it is there to bind the frozen block enough to slice, not to make a jelly. Soak it in the cold water until spongy, then dissolve it in the fruit juice brought just to a boil, and let the syrup cool before pouring it over the fruit or the layers will shift.
- Freezing timeFive hours likely reflects an early refrigerator's freezing compartment, which ran warmer than a modern freezer. In a modern home freezer the block should be solid in appreciably less time; longer does no harm.
- Let it temperFrozen hard, the fruit is flavourless and hard to cut. Move the block to the refrigerator for 15 to 20 minutes, or leave it on the counter for 5, before slicing — a knife dipped in hot water helps.
- The dressingEqual parts whipped cream and mayonnaise folded together is a period salad dressing, sweet-savoury and thick. Whip the cream to soft peaks and fold the mayonnaise in by hand; beating them together will break the cream.
- ServingFour servings, cut as squares or slices from the block and set on lettuce. The scale and dressing point to a luncheon dish.
Frozen fruit salads belong to the early decades of the household electric refrigerator, when the ice tray was a novelty and cookbooks — some of them issued by the appliance makers themselves — set out to prove it could do more than make ice cubes. Recipes of this type commonly share the same elements: canned fruit, a trace of gelatine, and a dressing of whipped cream cut with mayonnaise, frozen in the tray and served on lettuce as a lunch dish. The mayonnaise-and-cream combination reads oddly now, but sweetened dressings of this kind for fruit salads remained current for decades, and the maraschino cherries supplied the colour. The numbered title suggests the book carried more than one variation on the same tray-built idea.