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Dressing for Fruit Salad
A delicious dressing for a fruit salad is made from the yolks of three eggs beaten until thick, then adding gradually a cupful of sifted sugar, powdered, and a saltspoonful of salt, still beating until the sugar is dissolved; add the juice of two lemons and beat again. Prepare the fruit and place in layers in the salad bowl, alternating the dressing with the fruit.
This is a raw-yolk dressing: the eggs are beaten with sugar and lemon juice and spooned straight over fruit, with no cooking at any stage. That is the reason it cannot be recommended as written, and the notes below explain the terms and the hazard rather than offering a revised method.
- The eggs are never heatedThree yolks go into the bowl raw and reach the table raw. Nothing in the procedure brings them anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in egg yolk is reliably killed, and the dressing is layered with cold fruit and served cold.
- Sugar and lemon do not make it safeThe juice of two lemons in a cupful of sugar is often assumed to "cook" the yolks the way acid firms fish in ceviche. It does not pasteurize them; acid and sugar slow bacterial growth but do not eliminate pathogens already present in the egg.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg dressings are a recognised vehicle for salmonellosis, and the risk is not evenly shared: infants, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised should not eat them at all. If you want a cooked or pasteurized-egg fruit dressing, use a current recipe.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon was a very small spoon used with a salt cellar; period cookbooks generally reckon a saltspoonful as about a quarter teaspoon.
- "Sifted sugar, powdered"Not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Nineteenth-century powdered sugar was loaf or granulated sugar crushed fine and sifted, closer to today's caster sugar.
- Why the book gives no yieldThree yolks and a cupful of sugar make a generous amount, but the recipe specifies neither a quantity of fruit nor a number of servings.
Sweet fruit salads became fashionable in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, as rail freight widened the supply of oranges, bananas and pineapple to inland markets. Books of the period commonly distinguish savoury salads, dressed with oil and vinegar, from sweet ones taking a dressing closer to a custard or lemon curd: yolks, sugar and citrus beaten thick. Uncooked yolk dressings appear regularly in such books, though the modern egg supply chain makes that practice unsafe to copy.