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Banana and Orange Salad
Four oranges, three bananas, juice of one-half lemon, juice of two oranges, one-half cupful of sugar, white of one egg, one-half cupful of pineapple juice.
Slice and mix in a bowl the oranges and bananas. Heat to the boiling point, the orange and lemon juice, sugar and white of the egg, then simmer five minutes. Strain through a muslin upon the fruit, add the pineapple juice. Set away on ice to become chilled before serving.
A fruit salad built on a clarified sugar syrup, from the era when "salad" covered anything served cold in a bowl. The technique worth understanding is the egg white, which is there to clarify the syrup, not to enrich it.
- The egg white is a clarifierRaw white coagulates as the juice heats and traps cloudy particles, which are then left behind in the muslin. Beat it only lightly and stir it into the cold juice before heating, or it will set into ropes too large to filter evenly.
- Do not skip the strainingIf you pour the mixture over the fruit unstrained you get shreds of cooked egg through the salad. A double layer of cheesecloth, a fine chinois, or a coffee filter all work; muslin was simply what was in the drawer.
- CupfulsA cupful here is 8 fluid ounces. Half a cup of sugar to roughly half a cup of orange and lemon juice makes a heavy syrup, and with a further half cup of pineapple juice the finished dressing is quite sweet. Cutting the sugar to a third of a cup is reasonable with modern dessert oranges.
- Simmering five minutesFive minutes at a bare simmer is enough to set and lift the albumen and to thicken the syrup slightly. A hard boil will drive off the fresh orange aroma the recipe depends on, so keep it just barely moving.
- Cool the syrup firstStraining boiling syrup directly onto sliced bananas partly cooks them and turns them to mush. Let it come down to room temperature, add the pineapple juice, then pour over the fruit and chill.
- Preparing the orangesFour oranges are sliced for the bowl and two more are juiced, so buy six. Peel and remove the membrane from the four before slicing.
- Bananas and browningSlice the bananas last. The recipe's lemon juice all goes into the syrup, so tossing the slices in lemon juice first means using a little extra. Even so, this salad does not hold overnight; assemble it a couple of hours before serving at most.
- "Set away on ice"Either a bed of ice or the icebox; the modern equivalent is the refrigerator. Two hours covered is enough to chill through.
- YieldSix servings as a fruit course or light dessert, four if served as a salad plate on lettuce in the period manner.
Sweet fruit "salads" like this one belong to a specific moment in American cookery, when the salad course had expanded well beyond greens and could mean almost anything cold, cut up and dressed. Bananas are the tell: by the turn of the twentieth century steamship traffic and refrigerated rail had made them a cheap year-round staple in northern cities, and cookbook writers put them into everything, often paired with citrus from the newly commercial Florida and California groves. The clarified syrup is borrowed straight from confectionery and from the clear-soup kitchen, where beaten egg white had long been the standard way to fine a cloudy liquid; using it on a fruit dressing shows a household cook applying a technique she already knew. The half cupful of pineapple juice called for here was most likely the liquid drained from canned pineapple, rather than juice sold on its own, which did not become a widely available commercial product until considerably later; either way, such juice appears constantly in salads of this period as a shortcut to acidity and perfume.