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Orange Salad (Arrange layers of sliced)
Arrange layers of sliced oranges, sprinkling each layer with powdered sugar and shredded cocoanut. Sliced oranges when served alone should not stand long after slicing, as they are apt to become bitter.
Fruit Salad I Arrange alternate layers of shredded pineapple, sliced bananas, and sliced oranges, sprinkling each layer with powdered sugar. Chill before serving.
To Shred Pineapple. Pare and cut out eyes, pick off small pieces with a silver fork, continuing until all soft part is removed. To Slice Oranges. Remove skin and white covering, slice lengthwise that the tough centre may not be served; seeds should be removed.
Two assembly-only fruit desserts from the era when a fresh orange was still worth arranging on a plate. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the sugar, the coconut, and the timing.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn this book powdered sugar appears to mean finely granulated sugar, sifted, with confectioners' sugar named separately. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which can turn cloudy and pasty against the orange juice. Use superfine (caster) sugar, or ordinary granulated.
- CocoanutThe original assumes fresh coconut grated at home, or the unsweetened desiccated shred sold in bulk. Modern sweetened flaked coconut, layered with sugar over sweet oranges, makes the dish cloying — use unsweetened shredded or flaked coconut and cut the sugar back.
- The bitterness warning is real chemistryThe bitterness warning has a chemical basis -- cut citrus develops bitterness as limonin is released in the exposed flesh and pith over a half-hour or more. Slice the oranges close to serving, and take off the white albedo, where much of the bitterness sits.
- Slice lengthwiseCutting from stem end to blossom end, rather than in crosswise wheels, puts the fibrous central core along the edge of each slice where it can be trimmed away instead of leaving a tough plug in the middle of every round.
- The silver forkSilver was probably specified because tinned iron and early steel utensils could give acidic fruit a metallic taste. Any stainless steel fork is fine now. Shredding pineapple this way is slow; a cored pineapple cut into thin wedges is the practical substitute, though the texture is coarser.
- BananasThe book says nothing about browning. If you chill the salad as directed, toss the banana slices in orange juice first, and assemble no more than an hour ahead.
- ChillingThirty to sixty minutes in the refrigerator is enough. Longer draws out juice, collapses the layers, and gives the bitterness time to develop.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Figure one orange per person for the orange salad; for Fruit Salad I, a pineapple with three bananas and three oranges will serve about six as a light dessert.
Both of these come from a book written for a New England cooking school in the 1890s, when refrigerated rail cars and Florida and California groves had just turned oranges from a Christmas-stocking luxury into something a Boston housekeeper could buy most of the year. Coconut followed the same route: shredded, dried coconut was being packed and sold commercially in the northeastern United States by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which is why a recipe like this can assume it as a pantry item rather than telling the cook to crack a nut. Pineapple was the newest arrival of the three, coming up from the Caribbean. That a dessert consists of nothing but fruit, sugar and assembly instructions is the point he lu, and the cook's job was to show it off, which is also why the book bothers to explain the direction of the knife and the removal of the pith.