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Fruit Salad (Peel and slice four bananas)
Peel and slice four bananas, using a silver knife, peel three sweet oranges, cut in thin slices, and take out the pips; peel and eye a pineapple and pull in small bits, using a silver fork, arrange the fruit in layers, spreading over each layer the following dressing: Beat the yolks of three eggs until very thick and light in color, beat into them gradually one cupful and a quarter of a cupful of sifted powdered sugar and one-half teaspoonful of salt, continuing to beat until the sugar is dissolved; add the juice of two lemons and beat again. Keep the salad on ice until served.
A layered fruit salad under an uncooked egg-yolk dressing — a construction common in turn-of-the-century salad chapters and the reason this page carries a caution.
- Why it fails todayThe dressing is three raw egg yolks beaten with sugar, salt and lemon juice, and it is never heated at any point. Lemon juice lowers the pH but does not reliably inactivate Salmonella in yolk, and the finished salad is then held for a period on ice — a window in which any contamination present simply persists. For a cooked or otherwise safe dressing, use a current recipe.
- Silver knife and silver forkNot decorative. Carbon-steel blades of the period discoloured on contact with fruit acids and left a metallic taste, so silver or bone was specified for anything raw and acidic. Modern stainless steel makes the instruction moot.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this date "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. The direction to beat "until the sugar is dissolved" is the tell — it assumes a crystal that needs dissolving.
- The sugar quantity"One cupful and a quarter of a cupful" reads as 1¼ cups, an enormous amount against three yolks and the juice of two lemons. The dressing is closer to a sweet sauce than a salad dressing.
- Peel and eye a pineapple"Eyeing" means cutting out the tough fibrous eyes left after the skin is off, then pulling the flesh apart along its grain rather than slicing it.
- YieldFour bananas, three oranges and a whole pineapple make a large bowl; the recipe gives no yield, but it would plausibly serve eight or more as a dessert course.
Fruit salads of this kind sit awkwardly between the salad chapter and the dessert chapter, and turn-of-the-century American cookbooks filed them in both. What marks this one as its period is the dressing: a base of yolks, sugar, salt and acid of the sort used for cooked salad dressings, here left unheated. The ingredient list also records a change in the American larder: bananas, oranges and pineapple in one bowl reflect the widening late-nineteenth-century trade in tropical and citrus fruit. The instruction to keep the salad on ice assumes an icebox or a supply of ice.