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Fruit Salad II
Pare a pineapple and cut in one-quarter inch slices, remove hard centres, sprinkle with powdered sugar, set aside one hour in a cool place; drain, spread on serving dish, arrange a circle of thin slices of banana on each piece, nearly to the edge, pile strawberries in centre, pour over syrup drained from pineapple, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and serve with or without Cream Sauce.
A macerated fruit plate rather than a tossed salad, and the hour of sugaring is the whole technique: it draws a syrup out of the pineapple that dresses everything else.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period this is not quite modern confectioners' sugar, which was usually listed separately; it was a grade ground finer than granulated. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest modern match and dissolves into the pineapple juice cleanly for the macerating step.
- The macerationAn hour in a cool place means a cold larder, not a refrigerator, but the fridge does the job. Do not skip it or shorten it much; without the drawn-off syrup there is no dressing at all.
- PineappleThe "hard centres" are the woody core, most easily removed with a small round cutter or an apple corer once the fruit is sliced.
- BananasSlice them at the last moment and lay them straight onto the pineapple. The acid syrup slows browning but does not stop it, and bananas cut ahead will grey at the edges.
- StrawberriesHull and halve anything larger than a thumbnail so the centre pile holds its shape. Berries need no sugaring of their own here; the pineapple syrup carries enough.
- Cream SauceThe cross-reference is presumably to the book's sweet cream sauce rather than a savoury white sauce. Lightly whipped cream, barely sweetened, stands in for it without loss.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities; roughly one pineapple, two bananas and a pint of strawberries will serve six to eight. Assemble shortly before serving, as the plate weeps if it sits.
Fruit salads of this kind belong to the era when canned and shipped pineapple made the fruit an everyday luxury in northern American kitchens rather than a centrepiece to be admired — pineapples are often said to have been rented out for display, though the story rests on little documentary evidence. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 for the Boston Cooking School, is full of such cold desserts, arranged as much for looks as for taste: a circle of banana laid "nearly to the edge," a pile of berries in the centre, the whole thing built up on the plate in the composed style that late-Victorian and Edwardian table service favoured. The technique of sugaring fruit and letting it stand to draw its own syrup is much older than the book and needs no thickener, no gelatine and no cooking, which is precisely why it survived into an age of iceboxes.