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Fruit Salad with Wine Dressing
Arrange alternate layers of sliced fruit, using pineapples, bananas, oranges, and grapes; pour over all Wine Dressing, and let stand one hour in a cold place.
A macerated fruit dish rather than a salad in the modern sense, and the whole thing hinges on a dressing given elsewhere in the book. A few notes before you assemble it.
- The Wine DressingThe dish depends on a wine dressing given elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here. If you do not have the book's version to hand, any sweetened wine syrup works — roughly 1/2 cup sweet wine (sherry, Madeira or a light white) to 2 tablespoons sugar and a squeeze of lemon, warmed only enough to dissolve the sugar, then chilled.
- "A cold place"An icebox, a cellar or a north pantry. Use the refrigerator. The recipe asks for an hour; longer gives the pineapple and oranges more time to give up juice.
- Bananas lastSliced banana browns within minutes and turns to paste after an hour in acid syrup. Layer the pineapple, orange and grapes first, macerate those, and fold the banana in during the final ten minutes.
- PineappleThe recipe does not say whether fresh or canned. Canned pineapple in syrup will work, but sweeten the dressing less accordingly.
- GrapesPeriod recipes generally meant seeded grapes, halved and pipped. Modern seedless grapes need only halving.
- OrangesCut into supremes — segments freed from the membrane — rather than crosswise slices. The pith goes bitter as it sits in wine.
- YieldThe quantities here are open; one pineapple, three oranges, two bananas and a cup of grapes serves six as a light dessert, with a plain wafer or sponge cake alongside.
This belongs to a moment when fresh pineapple and winter oranges had become reliably available to the American middle-class household by rail and steamer, and cookbooks began treating fruit as dessert in its own right rather than as a preserve or a pie filling. Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book reads more like a cold dessert than a salad: the wine dressing is a sweet syrup, not a vinaigrette. The convention of pouring a fortified wine over cut fruit and letting it stand is much older than the book, generally traced to the European practice of macerating fruit in sweetened wine, and the same idea underlies everything from macedoine de fruits to later fruit cups. Farmer's instruction to arrange the fruit in alternate layers reflects the period's interest in dishes that looked composed at the table.