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Fruit Delight
10 1/4 Cup Strawberry Jam 1 Small Can Pineapple 1 Egg White 2 Tablespoons Pineapple 2 Bananas Combine chopped oranges, bananas, pineapples and nuts. Serve pieces in fruit juice. Place in sherbet dishes.
Cover top with meringue made of eggwhite beaten stiff with sugar.
A cold fruit cup from the era when a can of pineapple counted as a luxury. The topping, not the fruit, is the problem.
- The uncooked meringueEgg white beaten stiff with sugar and spooned onto cold fruit is never heated at any stage. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that no amount of beating removes, and the dish is then held cold in sherbet dishes, which does nothing to reduce it. If you want a meringue-topped fruit cup, follow a current recipe built around pasteurized whites.
- Quantities do not add upThe ingredient line calls for strawberry jam and two spoons of pineapple that never reappear in the method, while the oranges and nuts named in the method are never quantified. Treat the proportions as unusable and work from a modern recipe if you want to build the fruit cup itself.
- Canned pineappleA "small can" of the period was likely around 8 oz, roughly a cup of crushed or tidbit pineapple, though can sizes varied. Canned rather than fresh may matter here: fresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme destroyed by the heat of canning, which can slacken protein-set mixtures.
- Sherbet dishesFooted glass coupes holding roughly 5 to 6 oz. With the oranges and nuts unquantified, the yield cannot be worked out from the recipe as written.
- Bananas and browningSliced bananas darken within minutes. Acidic juice slows it, though the recipe specifies only "fruit juice" and gives no reason for dressing the fruit before it goes into the dishes.
Bridal cookbooks of the early twentieth century were assembled for young women setting up house with a small budget, a limited batterie de cuisine and a pantry that increasingly relied on tinned goods. Canned pineapple, shipped from Hawaii in quantity from the 1900s onward, was widely available as a store-cupboard item, and "fruit delight" style desserts, chopped fruit in juice under a sweet white topping, appear under dozens of interchangeable names in community and promotional cookbooks of the period. Uncooked meringue is often said to have been common practice then; eggs came from known flocks or the back yard, and the systemic contamination risks that make raw egg a concern today were not understood.