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Fresh-Fruit Cup
1/2 pineapple 1 cup strawberries 3 bananas 3 oranges 2 tablespoons lemon-juice Sugar Peel and dice the pineapple, bananas and oranges. Wash and hull the strawberries. Mix all together, with the lemon-juice and sugar, and set on ice until very cold.
A plain macedoine of fruit, and the only real technique is timing and temperature. Everything hinges on cutting the fruit close to serving so the bananas and berries hold their shape.
- "Set on ice"In a 1920s kitchen this meant the icebox or a bowl nested in cracked ice. Thirty to sixty minutes in the refrigerator does the same job; longer than a couple of hours and the bananas darken and the strawberries slump.
- Sugar to tasteNo quantity is given because it depends on the fruit. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons for this volume, toss, wait ten minutes for it to dissolve into juice, then taste before adding more.
- Lemon juice does double dutyIt sharpens the sweetness and slows browning on the bananas and pineapple. Toss the bananas in the lemon juice first, then fold in the rest.
- PineappleHalf a fresh pineapple yields roughly 2 cups diced. Cut out the fibrous core; canned pineapple works but brings its own syrup, so cut the added sugar back.
- OrangesDicing peeled oranges leaves bitter white pith in the cup. Segmenting them over the bowl, so the juice is caught, gives a cleaner result.
- YieldAbout 6 cups, which would fill six or more stemmed glasses, or fewer bowls if served as a dessert portion.
- ServingFruit cup in this period opened a meal as often as it closed one. A little of the accumulated juice spooned over each portion matters more than any garnish.
The "fruit cup" was a fixture of American menus from the 1910s through the 1950s, served in a footed glass as a first course at luncheons and formal dinners as well as a dessert. Its popularity is usually linked to improved year-round shipments of citrus and bananas, and to the growing availability of pineapple, so that a hostess in a northern city could set out several fruits in the same bowl outside their local season. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Delineator magazine's household department, and recipes like this one, brief, ungarnished and assuming the cook could judge sugar for herself, are typical of the way that magazine wrote for its readers.