Home › Salad Dressings › Fruit Salad (Sweet to serve with cake PEEL)
Fruit Salad (Sweet to serve with cake PEEL)
(Sweet, to serve with cake.) PEEL and slice four bananas, also four oranges, lengthwise, carefully removing pith and seeds.
Dissect half a ripe pineapple, taking the pulp from the core in small pieces with a silver fork. Hull and wash a part of a basket of strawberries. Arrange the fruit in the salad-bowl, making each layer smaller than the preceding. Pour over the dressing given below, and serve thoroughly chilled.
A plain layered fruit salad from the era when "salad" could mean dessert. Almost everything here is still sound; the only real problems are the vanished measurements and the bananas.
- Bananas lastSliced bananas brown within minutes of being cut. Assemble the oranges, pineapple and berries first, slice the bananas directly into the bowl, and dress immediately so the acid in the citrus and pineapple coats them.
- "A basket" of strawberriesBerries were commonly sold in quart boxes or baskets, though sizes were not standard and a quart runs well over a pound. "A part of a basket" is genuinely vague; half a pound of hulled berries, about 1½ cups, suits this quantity of other fruit.
- The silver forkSilver was probably specified because tin and the ordinary steel of the period could react with fruit acid and leave a metallic taste. Any stainless steel or plastic tool is fine now; the point of the fork rather than a knife is to lift the pineapple flesh away in ragged pieces that hold dressing.
- Oranges sliced lengthwiseCutting a peeled orange lengthwise through the segments leaves membrane in every piece. Supreming the oranges instead -- cutting the segments free of their walls over a bowl to catch the juice -- gives the same effect the "removing pith" instruction is reaching for.
- Pineapple coreTake the pulp off the core rather than through it. The core is edible but woody, and in an undercooked fruit salad it reads as stringy.
- ChillingAn hour in the refrigerator, covered, is enough. Much longer and the strawberries slump; pineapple's bromelain will also work on a cream or custard dressing if the two sit together.
- The dressingThe original points to a separate sweet dressing given immediately below, so this page is only half the dish. Any of the period sweet salad dressings work: whipped cream folded with sugar, or a cooked egg-and-lemon dressing thinned with orange juice.
- YieldFour bananas, four oranges, half a pineapple and a half pound of berries serve six to eight as a dessert course alongside plain cake.
Sweet fruit salads served with cake belong to a moment when American cooks were gaining much wider access to bananas, oranges and pineapple. Steamship lines and refrigerated rail brought Central American bananas and Florida and California citrus into northern markets through the 1880s and 1890s, and canned Hawaiian pineapple followed around the turn of the century -- though this recipe assumes a fresh one, still uncommon enough to warrant the careful instruction about the core. The heading "Sweet, to serve with cake" reflects the period's genuinely elastic use of the word salad: it could cover things arranged in a bowl and dressed, savoury or sweet, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s often printed sweet dressings of whipped cream or cooked custard alongside mayonnaise and French dressing. The pyramid of diminishing layers is table presentation, from an era when a dish was expected to be looked at before it was eaten.