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Fruit Salad Dressing
1 cup pineapple juice juice of 1 lemon and orange 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup sugar 1 tablespoon cornstarch 2 beaten eggs 1 cup whipped cream Pour combined fruit juices over the sugar mixed with cornstarch and salt. Cook in double boiler till thick, then add the beaten eggs. Stirring constantly, cook 5 minutes longer. Cool. Just before serving add the whipped cream.
A cooked custard dressing lightened with whipped cream, meant for fruit salads rather than greens. The whole thing hinges on getting the eggs in without scrambling them.
- Temper the eggsBeat the eggs in a bowl, whisk a ladleful of the hot thickened juice into them, then return the mixture to the double boiler. Adding cold beaten eggs straight into hot starch, as written, will curdle unless you are whisking hard from the first second.
- Double boiler, not direct heatKeep the water below the upper pan at a bare simmer and do not let it touch the base. Gentle, even heat is the point; the finished dressing should nap a spoon rather than boil hard.
- The five minutes mattersCornstarch needs a sustained hot hold to lose its raw, chalky taste, and the eggs need it to reach a safe temperature. Stir the whole time and scrape the corners of the pan.
- Juice quantitiesJuice of one lemon and one orange is roughly 3 tablespoons and 1/4 cup respectively, so figure about 1 1/2 cups of liquid in total. Fresh pineapple juice should be fine here, as cooking deactivates the bromelain that can interfere with protein setting.
- Cool it properlyPress plastic wrap onto the surface or stir occasionally as it cools to prevent a skin. It must be cold before the cream goes in, or the cream will deflate on contact.
- Folding the creamWhip to soft peaks only and fold in with a spatula just before serving. Whipped to stiff peaks it will streak rather than blend, and once folded the dressing will not hold its lightness for long.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly 2 1/2 cups dressed, enough for eight to ten fruit salad servings. The custard base will keep a few days covered in the refrigerator; add the cream only to what you are serving.
Cooked dressings of this kind - a starch-and-egg base bound with juice, then slackened with cream - sit between plain boiled dressing and mayonnaise in American home cooking, and they turn up frequently with fruit salads. The pineapple juice is a useful period marker: canned pineapple juice became a widely stocked pantry item from about the 1930s as Hawaiian canneries scaled up, and it appears often in the salad chapters of books from that stretch. Dressings like this were commonly served with the molded and arranged fruit salads associated with ladies' luncheons.