While we adorn our tables at Thanksgiving with arrangements displaying the bounty of the harvest, including pumpkins, apples and oranges, many cooks look for fruit dishes to offset the heaviness of the rest of the traditional menu. Thus, cranberry sauce, either made from scratch or dished up from a can, ends up on most serving tables.
Of course, while there’s pumpkin pie for dessert, cooks in previous years often turned to congealed salads. One recent magazine offered a new spin on this idea with a molded, layered cranberry salad. And cooked berries and apples can always be turned into desserts.
But two of the best fresh fruit salads for holidays are Waldorf Salad, which I grew up eating, and Ambrosia, which my husband's family preferred. Say Waldorf Salad and I’m back sitting at my paternal grandparents’ ancient dining room table. It is laden with food. Close my eyes and I can even recall the taste of apples and walnuts coated in mayonnaise.
Bob’s mother always made ambrosia for holidays. Often her sisters living in Florida would bring her oranges just for this speciality dish. As my sister-in-law and I took over most of the holiday cooking chores I began making the ambrosia for family dinners. It’s a dish that I now serve guests in fall and winter, when summer and spring fruits are not plentiful. None of us ever took over making yeast rolls. Store bought has sufficed for years.
According to Sabrina Snyder, writing for the Dinner then Dessert webpage, Oscar Tschirky, Oscar of the Waldorf, the maitre d’ of New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, invented the original Waldorf salad and named it for the hotel in the 1880s. Oscar is also credited for inventing Eggs Benedict and Veal Oscar. While he wrote a cookbook, he never worked as a chef. The hotel, even to this day, displays a photograph of him on its walls.
Ambrosia, a concoction named for the foods of the Greek gods, began in the South, probably because oranges are grown in the South. The earliest printed record that Robert Moss of Serious Eats could locate was in an 1867 cookbook, Dixie Cookery by Maria Massey, Barringer, North Carolina. By the 1870s, various recipes for this salad appeared in newspapers across the country.
Surprising to me is the coconut ingredient. Moss explains that the tropical fruit traveled East from West by railcars. Since several in my family do not like coconut, I always serve it in a separate dish.
Waldorf Salad
3 Fuji apples, chopped into bite size pieces
1-1/2 cups of grapes, cut in half
2 stalks of celery, chopped in small pieces
3/4/ cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
Blend mayonnaise, lemon juice, sugar, salt and pepper. Chop fruit and nuts. Blend together. Chill before serving.
Ambrosia
4-5 lb. bag of Valencia or Navel oranges.
Shredded coconut
1 large can crushed pineapple
A jar of maraschino cherries, paper towel-dried with each cherry cut in half
Miniature marshmallows
The day before serving, peel oranges removing as much pith as possible. Working with clean hands over a dish to catch both pulp and juice, work pulp from oranges. Discard membrane and seeds.
Add crushed pineapple. Cover and chill until next day. Add cherries and marshmallows. Stir and serve.
(Some recipes call for chopped pecans, but my mother-in-law never added nuts and neither do I.)
2022
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