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Fresh-Fruit Cup
1½ pineapple
1 cup strawberries
3 oranges
2 tablespoons lemon-juice
3 bananas
Sugar
Peel and dice the pineapple, bananas and oranges. Wash and juice hull the strawberries. Mix all together, with the lemonand sugar, and set on ice until very cold.
A macerated fruit salad meant to be served in glasses before or after a meal. Nothing here is difficult; the only decisions the original leaves to you are the amount of sugar and how long it chills.
- The pineapple quantity"1½ pineapple" is printed without a plural and is genuinely ambiguous — it most likely means one and a half pineapples, which with three oranges and three bananas gives a large bowl. One medium pineapple is ample if you want a smaller yield.
- YieldAs written this fills six to eight fruit cups or stemmed glasses. Halve everything for four.
- Sugar, unmeasuredThe original lists sugar with no quantity because it depends on the fruit. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons for the full batch, toss, and taste after ten minutes — the sugar draws juice out of the strawberries and pineapple and the mixture sweetens as it sits.
- The lemon juice is structuralThe lemon juice -- Two tablespoons will also help keep the sliced bananas from browning, so it is worth adding the bananas and the lemon juice at the same moment and tossing immediately rather than dicing them ahead.
- Handling the oranges"Peel and dice" works, but cutting away the white pith and slipping the segments out of their membranes gives a cleaner cup and less bitterness. Catch the juice and add it to the bowl.
- StrawberriesThe line "Wash and juice hull the strawberries" appears to be a typesetting scramble for "wash and hull." Hull them after washing so they do not take on water, and halve or quarter anything large.
- "Set on ice until very cold"This meant a bowl nested in an ice-filled basin; the refrigerator does the same job. One to two hours is right. Much longer and the bananas go slippery and the berries soften in the juice.
- If you add dairy or gelatinFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will keep gelatin from setting; the fruit's acidity can also curdle cream. Serve the cup plain, or with cream added at the table.
The "fruit cup" as a named course is generally traced to the early twentieth century, when refrigeration and the refrigerated railcar are often said to have widened the reach of pineapples, bananas and winter oranges among ordinary American households. Butterick's cookbooks addressed a middle-class readership being taught the conventions of formal service, and a chilled fruit cup was a common opening to a company dinner and a way of displaying out-of-season fruit, which was arguably much of its appeal. The combination of pineapple, orange and banana with a few berries for color appears to recur in American recipe collections for decades afterward, and is often linked to the gelatin-stiffened or mayonnaise-dressed "fruit salad" of the mid-century table.