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Fruit Bowl
Take half of a large pineapple and cut off all the outside pithy part, cut it up into slices and then into small squares and put them in a basin; add five or six ripe peaches cut in halves, and then in slices, also the same quantity of apricots peeled and cut into slices, one or two handfuls of stoned cherries and double the quantity of raspberries and red currants. Pour over one wineglassful of syrup and two wineglassfuls of claret and set the basin on ice. Put the cuttings from a pineapple into a mortar, pound it well, put it into a sieve with one quart of strawberries, rub them through into a basin and mix in a quart bottle of champagne mixed with a wineglassful of syrup. Pack a thin china basin in ice, pour in the champagne mixture, and stir for twenty minutes; then add the strained juice of two oranges and the mixed fruits. Serve with small fancy biscuits when the mixture is quite cold.
This is a chilled fruit macedoine finished with a champagne purée — closer to a spoonable punch than a fruit salad. It depends entirely on ripe summer fruit and on getting everything genuinely cold before it goes to the table.
- Wineglassful and syrupA wineglass is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, which would make the macerating liquid roughly 2 oz syrup and 4 oz claret, with another 2 oz of syrup in the champagne mixture. "Syrup" means a plain sugar syrup; the recipe gives no proportions, and period syrups ran from roughly equal parts sugar and water to considerably heavier.
- Basin means bowlEvery "basin" here is a mixing bowl. The "thin china basin" packed in ice is chosen for its thinness so the cold passes through quickly; a stainless bowl set in an ice bath does the same job faster.
- The hinge: keep it below cold, not frozenThe hinge: keep it cold, not frozen -- Twenty minutes of stirring over ice is meant to get the champagne purée thoroughly cold before the fruit goes in. Plain ice without salt will not actually freeze it, but keep it fluid rather than slushy so the fruit is not bruised when folded in.
- Pineapple trimmingsThe "outside pithy part" is presumably the tough eye layer just under the skin, and the "cuttings" pounded in the mortar are those trimmings; the recipe does not say whether the core is included. A blender and a fine sieve replace mortar and sieve; press hard, as pineapple fibre holds a surprising amount of juice.
- ClaretNineteenth-century American menus used claret for dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, light-bodied red with decent acidity works; avoid anything oaky or jammy, which will flatten the fruit.
- Fruit substitutionsFresh apricots and red currants are the two items likely to defeat a modern shopper. Both can be dropped without wrecking the dish, though the currants supply most of its tartness — a little extra raspberry and a squeeze of lemon compensates.
- Assemble lateCut peaches and apricots soften on standing and the raspberries collapse. Macerate the fruit no more than about an hour ahead and open the champagne only when the ice bath is ready.
- Yield and servingA quart bottle of champagne plus a quart of strawberries and all that fruit makes eight to ten generous servings, served in stemmed glasses or shallow bowls with spoons. "Small fancy biscuits" means crisp thin cookies — langues de chat, tuiles, or plain wafers.
Fruit bowls of this kind sat at the point where dessert and punch met, and they were served in the same spirit as a cup or a cobbler: cold, alcoholic, and eaten with a spoon. The technique is the classic macedoine " several fruits cut small, sugared, and moistened with wine " here enriched with a strained pur"e of pineapple and strawberry mounted with champagne, which is essentially a soft frapp". A large New York hotel kitchen had plentiful ice at a time when domestic mechanical refrigeration did not yet exist, which is why the recipe spends so much of its length on packing basins in ice and stirring over it rather than simply saying "chill." The seasonal roll call of peaches, apricots, cherries, raspberries and red currants also dates it firmly: this is a high-summer dish from an era when out-of-season fruit was far less readily had, and it assumes the fruit arrives ripe enough to need almost nothing done to it.