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Orange-and-Banana Salad
(Sweet.) Stir the juice of two oranges, half a cup of sherry wine, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, half a cup of sugar and the unbeaten white of an egg, over the fire, until the boiling-point is reached; let simmer slowly ten minutes, strain through a cheesecloth, and, when thoroughly chilled, pour over three bananas and three oranges, sliced and mixed together in a salad-bowl. Sprinkle with half a cup of dessicated cocoanut. Serve thoroughly chilled.
A cooked sweet dressing from the era when fruit salads were served as a dessert course. The syrup is essentially a clarified fruit wine sauce, and the egg white is there to clear it, not to thicken it.
- The egg white is a clarifierStirred in unbeaten and brought to a boil, it coagulates and traps cloudy particles from the citrus juice, which are then removed by the cheesecloth. Do not beat it first or you will get a foam that clogs the cloth rather than a clear amber syrup.
- Keep the heat moderateStir constantly as it comes up to the boil so the albumen sets in loose flakes instead of on the pan bottom. Once it simmers, leave it alone; ten minutes is right, and it will soften the raw edge of the sherry, though some alcohol remains.
- SherryA dry to medium (fino or amontillado) sherry probably suits this better than modern sweet cream sherry, though the book does not specify a type. Avoid anything labelled "cooking sherry," which is salted. Half a cup is about 120 ml.
- Sugar quantityHalf a cup of sugar plus two oranges' juice makes a distinctly sweet syrup by current taste. A third of a cup is enough with sweet ripe oranges.
- Desiccated cocoanutThis is unsweetened dried shredded coconut, sold today as desiccated or macaroon coconut. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the finished dish cloying; toasting the dry kind briefly in a skillet improves it.
- Cut the fruit lateSlice the bananas just before the syrup goes on, or they will brown. The citrus juice in the dressing slows discoloration, so combine and chill together rather than prepping the bananas ahead.
- Chilling mattersThe instruction to chill "thoroughly" is repeated twice for good reason: warm sherry syrup on banana tastes muddy. Give the strained syrup at least two hours in the refrigerator before it meets the fruit.
- YieldThree oranges and three bananas with this much syrup serves four to six as a dessert or a sweet salad course.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899), a book written for the American middle-class household at a moment when both the salad course and the chafing-dish were fashionable. The "sweet" salads in it sit awkwardly between courses by modern reckoning: bananas and oranges were becoming cheaper and more reliably available in northeastern cities as the banana trade grew. Clearing a syrup or aspic with egg white was standard confectionery and jelly practice of the period, familiar from consommé.