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Fruit Cup
1 Cup Banana, cut up 1 Cup Orange, cut up 1 Cup Cherries, pitted 1/2 Cup Honey Ştir up the banana, orange, and cherries with the liquid honey. Garnish with slices of comb honey and serve.
A three-fruit macedoine held together with honey rather than syrup. The only technical demands are ripeness and timing.
- YieldRoughly three cups of fruit dressed with honey serves four as a light dessert, or six in small glasses as a first course. It does not keep past a few hours.
- Liquid honeyThis means honey that pours — clover, orange blossom or another mild variety. Crystallised honey can be warmed gently in a bowl over hot water until it flows, then cooled before it touches the fruit.
- Half a cup is a lotHalf a cup of honey to three cups of fruit is very sweet by current taste, especially with sweet cherries. A quarter cup, added to taste, suits most palates and lets the orange come through.
- Comb honeyThe garnish is a slice cut from a section of honeycomb — the wax is edible and chewed rather than swallowed. Comb honey is still sold at farm markets and by beekeepers; if you cannot find it, the dish is complete without it.
- The banana is the hingeCut it last and toss it into the honey immediately. Honey and the orange juice released in cutting will slow browning, but banana left sitting in air for even ten minutes turns grey at the edges.
- CherriesThe recipe does not say which kind; either sour or sweet could be meant, and sour ones balance the honey better. Sweet cherries are fine, but reduce the honey further. Frozen pitted cherries release water; thaw and drain them well if you use them.
- Orange'Cut up' most likely means peeled, sectioned and the sections cut across, with as much white pith removed as patience allows. Work over the bowl so the juice is not lost.
- ChillingHalf an hour in the refrigerator draws juice from the fruit and thins the honey into a light syrup. Longer than a couple of hours and the banana softens to mush.
Fruit cups appear all over American cookery of the early twentieth century, when refrigeration made cold fruit at the start or end of a meal an easy show of modernity, and when out-of-season bananas and oranges arriving by rail and steamship were still worth putting on a menu by name. Honey as the sweetener, and comb honey as the garnish, points to the period's enthusiasm for honey as a wholesome alternative to refined sugar. It is exactly the kind of recipe that asks nothing difficult of a cook — no oven, no timing to misjudge, and presentable in a glass.