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Fruit Salad
Take half a pound of very ripe cherries and remove the stalks and stones; then take a quarter of a pound each of red and white currants and pick and hull a quarter of a pound each of raspberries and strawberries; sprinkle over the fruit plenty of powdered white sugar and two or three tablespoonfuls of brandy. Stir and shake the fruit about lightly until the sugar is dissolved, and serve.
A macerated summer fruit salad that depends entirely on the fruit being at peak ripeness — there is nothing else in it but sugar and brandy. The total weight is about 1 1/2 lb of fruit.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" sugar means sugar ground finer than granulated, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Use superfine or caster sugar, which dissolves in the fruit juices without clouding them. Start with about 1/4 cup and adjust to the fruit.
- CurrantsRed and white currants are the true Ribes berries, not dried Zante currants. They are tart and seedy and appear in farmers' markets for a few weeks in midsummer; if you cannot find them, gooseberries or a little more raspberry will stand in, though the salad loses its sharp edge.
- Picked and hulledStrip currants from their stems with a fork, hull the strawberries, and halve or quarter them if large so they sit at the same scale as the cherries and raspberries.
- Handle onceRaspberries collapse under stirring. Combine everything in a wide bowl, sugar it, and turn the bowl rather than the fruit — the instruction to "shake the fruit about lightly" is the whole technique.
- Give it timeThe recipe says to serve as soon as the sugar dissolves, but 20 to 30 minutes in the refrigerator draws out considerably more syrup and lets the brandy settle into the fruit. Longer than about two hours and the raspberries go slack.
- The brandyTwo or three tablespoons across 1 1/2 lb of fruit is a seasoning, not a soak. A plain Cognac or an unaged fruit brandy works; kirsch is the natural choice with cherries.
- Yield and servingServes four to six in shallow glasses or coupes, with the accumulated syrup spooned over. Unsweetened whipped cream, a plain sponge finger, or nothing at all.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the repertoire of the old Waldorf, where a dish this plain earned its place by arriving at the right moment in a long menu — a cold, sharp fruit course after heavy roasts and sauces. The technique is French macération: ripe fruit, fine sugar, a spirit, and no cooking, the sugar drawing out juice to make its own syrup. The particular combination here is a marker of season and of expense in a hotel kitchen at the book's 1896 publication, since cherries, both colors of currant, raspberries and strawberries overlap for only a short stretch of early summer in the Northeast, and a kitchen buying all four at once was buying at the peak of the market. Red and white currants were more common on American tables then than now; they receded from commerce after federal and state restrictions on Ribes planting beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, imposed because the bushes host white pine blister rust, and they have only slowly come back.