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Fruit Cup
1 cup shredded pineapple 1 cup orange sections
3 tablespoons powdered sugar 1 cup ripe strawberries or 1 tablespoon lemon juice raspberries
1 large ripe banana, sliced
Mix the fruits, add the sugar; cover and let stand in the icebox until chilled. Serve in sherbet glasses and pile on whipped cream flavored with almond or vanilla, and a few red raspberries or maraschino cherries.
A cold macerated fruit salad from the era when "fruit cup" opened a formal dinner. The whole method is in the resting time, so plan for it.
- Reading the ingredientsThe quantities run: 1 cup shredded pineapple, 1 cup orange sections, 1 cup ripe strawberries or raspberries, 1 large ripe banana sliced, 3 tablespoons powdered sugar, 1 tablespoon lemon juice.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period powdered sugar generally means finely granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Superfine or caster sugar dissolves into the juices without clouding them.
- IceboxAn icebox held roughly 45-50F, warmer than a modern refrigerator. Thirty minutes to an hour in the fridge is enough to chill the fruit and draw out syrup; much beyond two hours and the strawberries and banana go slack.
- Shredded pineappleThis most likely means fresh pineapple torn or scraped along the grain into coarse threads rather than cut in cubes, which is why it releases so much juice. Canned crushed pineapple substitutes readily; drain it or the cup turns soupy.
- The bananaSlice it last and fold it in just before chilling. The lemon juice is doing double duty here, sharpening the sugar and slowing the banana's browning.
- Almond flavoringAlmond extract in whipped cream is easy to overdo; a scant quarter teaspoon per cup of cream is plenty against this much fruit.
- YieldAbout four cups of fruit, which fills four to six sherbet or coupe glasses depending on how generously you mound the cream.
The fruit cup was a fixture of the early twentieth-century American dinner as a first course, not a dessert: something cold, sharp and small to open a meal, served in a footed sherbet glass often set into a second bowl of crushed ice. Its rise tracks the spread of mechanical refrigeration and of canned Hawaiian pineapple, which made a mixed tropical fruit dish possible in a Northern January for the first time. The maraschino cherry on top belongs to the same moment, when the bright preserved cherry was often the finishing note on a chilled sweet. Menu books like this one list a fruit cup at the head of dozens of dinners, varying only the fruit, because a hostess needed a course that could be assembled hours ahead and required nothing of the cook at serving time.