Home › Entertaining › Ambrosia
Ambrosia
Fill the glasses with alternate layers of sliced orange and cocoa nut; cover with powdered sugar and place a maraschino cherry on the top of each.
A layered fruit glass rather than a bowl of salad, and it depends entirely on how the oranges are cut. Everything else is assembly.
- "Cocoa nut"Fresh coconut, grated on the coarse side of a box grater, not the sweetened flake sold in bags today. If you use packaged coconut, choose unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut and cut the sugar back, since sweetened flake plus powdered sugar will bury the fruit.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" generally meant a sugar ground finer than granulated but coarser than modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest modern equivalent; confectioners' sugar tends to dissolve into a paste against the wet fruit.
- Cutting the orangesThe hinge of the dish. Peel to the flesh, remove all white pith, then slice crosswise into thin rounds and halve them, or cut free segments. Pith and membrane make the whole glass bitter and stringy, and no amount of sugar hides it.
- GlassesSherbet or stemmed dessert glasses, roughly 6 to 8 ounces, suit it; the recipe itself specifies only "the glasses". Build three or four alternating layers so the coconut shows through the side of the glass.
- Maraschino cherriesThe original maraschino cherry was a Marasca cherry preserved in maraschino liqueur, but cheaper dyed and brined imitations were already widely sold in America by this period, and Prohibition finished off the liqueur-preserved version. A jarred Luxardo-style cherry is closer to the older article, though which the recipe assumed cannot be established.
- TimingAssemble no more than an hour ahead and refrigerate. Longer and the juice weeps to the bottom, the sugar melts, and the layers collapse into a single orange slurry.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, three medium navel oranges and about a cup of grated coconut will fill four to six small glasses.
Ambrosia is a Southern American dessert, generally traced to the second half of the nineteenth century, with printed recipes known from the later 1860s onward; the name borrows the food of the Greek gods, a common flourish in Victorian menu-writing. In its original form it is a company dish rather than a family one: whole oranges and a fresh coconut were an expense, and the layered presentation in stemmed glasses was meant to be looked at before it was eaten. The marshmallows, canned pineapple, and sour cream that many people now associate with ambrosia are later additions, arriving with mass-market canning and refrigeration well after this recipe was written.