Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Frozen Fruit Salad
Frozen Fruit Salad
1 pint cream
1 teaspoon instantaneous gela- 1½ cups fruit cut fine (cherries, tin peaches, pineapple, etc.)
2 tablespoons cold water
¾ cup mayonnaise
Lettuce
1 teaspoon powdered sugar
Soak the gelatin in the cold water, melt it over steam, and beat it into the mayonnaise. Add the sugar to the cream and whip it, then combine with the mayonnaise. Stir in the cut-up fruit. Pack in ice and freeze as for a mousse. The mayonnaise may be omitted from the mixture to be frozen and served separately.
A still-frozen salad from the era when whipped cream and mayonnaise met on the same plate. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need translating: the gelatin and the freezing method.
- Freeze as for a mousseThis means still-freezing: the mixture goes into a mold, the mold is buried in cracked ice and rock salt, and it sets without churning. A covered loaf pan or metal mold in the freezer does the same work, though it will need several hours to set firm; there is no stirring, which is why the whipped cream matters.
- Instantaneous gelatinPeriod shorthand for the granulated powdered gelatin that was displacing sheet gelatin and calf's-foot stock. One teaspoon is a little under half a modern quarter-ounce envelope.
- Melt it over steamA double boiler or a bowl over simmering water. Gelatin should never be boiled, and it must be only warm, not hot, when it goes into the mayonnaise. Poured in hot it will thin the emulsion; poured into cold mayonnaise straight from the refrigerator it seizes into threads. Bring the mayonnaise to room temperature first and beat steadily.
- The mayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise here is raw egg in a dish that is never heated. Use a commercial jarred mayonnaise or one made with pasteurized eggs. The salad also works with the mayonnaise left out of the frozen mixture and passed separately, as the recipe allows.
- CreamOne pint is 2 cups; use heavy or whipping cream and whip it to soft peaks only, since it stiffens further as it freezes. The teaspoon of powdered sugar is a token amount, meant to season rather than sweeten.
- The fruitCanned or cooked fruit, drained well and patted dry, works best here. Avoid fresh pineapple or fresh kiwi: their enzymes break down gelatin and the salad will not set.
- ServingUnmold, slice, and set each slice on a lettuce leaf. A pint of cream plus the fruit gives roughly 8 salad-course portions. Let it stand 5 to 10 minutes out of the freezer before cutting, or the slices shatter.
Frozen fruit salads belong to a narrow, confident moment in American cooking when the salad course had drifted a long way from greens. Butterick, best known for dress patterns and for The Delineator, published household books of this kind as part of the same enterprise of instructing the middle-class homemaker, and its recipes reflect what a well-supplied pantry could then buy ready-made: powdered gelatin, canned cherries and peaches and pineapple. The combination of sweetened whipped cream with mayonnaise reads oddly now, and the fat may well have done useful work here, discouraging the frozen mixture from setting into a solid block of ice. The instruction to "freeze as for a mousse" assumes the reader already knows the ice-and-salt packing method, which tells you how routine still-freezing was in these households.