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Fruit Salad in Orange Cups
3 oranges 3 slices pineapple 12 marshmallows 1/2 cup chopped nut meats 1 cup white grapes lettuce or cress Cut oranges in half. Remove pulp carefully, and cut out membranes, leaving cups. Mix orange pulp with diced pineapple, marshmallows, cut in small pieces, chopped nut meats and white grapes skinned, seeded and cut in halves. Fill orange cups with mixture and place on lettuce or cress, garnished with fruit, salad dressing and a few chopped nut meats and grapes, which are reserved for that use.
A straightforward assembly salad from the era when the container was half the point. Nothing here is cooked, so the work is all in hollowing the oranges cleanly and choosing a dressing that suits a sweet fruit mixture.
- YieldThree oranges halved gives six cups, one per person at a small card table. The filling is generous enough that you will have a little over; serve it alongside rather than mounding the cups past the rim.
- Hollowing the cupsCut across the equator, run a grapefruit knife or small serrated knife between pulp and pith, then lift out the segments and squeeze the membranes over a bowl to catch juice. Slicing a thin sliver off the base of each half keeps it from rocking on the plate.
- Grapes"White grapes" here means green table grapes, which in the period had seeds and needed skinning. Modern seedless green grapes need only halving, so skip that whole step.
- PineappleThree slices most likely means canned rings, which were widely available. Drain them well or the filling turns watery; roughly 3/4 to 1 cup diced if you are cutting from a fresh fruit.
- MarshmallowsTwelve marshmallows cut small; miniatures can stand in, measured by eye rather than by a fixed conversion. Cut them with scissors dipped in cold water or dusted with confectioners' sugar.
- Salad dressingFor a fruit salad of this date that means a cooked boiled dressing or a mayonnaise thinned and sweetened with whipped cream, not a vinaigrette. A spoonful of mayonnaise folded into lightly whipped cream is the closest modern equivalent.
- TimingMix and fill no more than an hour ahead and keep chilled. The marshmallows soften and the pineapple draws juice out of everything if it sits longer.
Fruit served in its own hollowed shell was a common dish at the luncheon table, where the food had to look composed on a small plate and be eaten without much cutting. The marshmallow is a rough guide to date: commercially made marshmallows appear increasingly in American salads from around the 1910s, used alongside canned pineapple and a sweetened mayonnaise dressing. The pairing of mayonnaise with fruit reads oddly now, but it was unremarkable in the period, and cookbooks of the time treated a salad as any cold composed dish, sweet or savoury, served on a leaf of lettuce.