All the Ingredients

Retro Food: Franklin Simon's Frozen Fruit Salad

In every cooking family's recipe box, there are favorites that have come from beloved restaurants. My recipe box includes Brown Derby Grapefruit Cake (Los Angeles), the Grubsteak Restaurant's Lemon Meringue Pie (Phoenix), The Bakery's Beef Wellington (Chicago), and Cheese Crisps from Jordan's Mexican Restaurant (Phoenix--still open!).

There are also recipes that have come through my family from the tea rooms that used to be found in upscale department stores. An integral part of going shopping with my mother was having lunch at the restaurant in Diamond's Department Store, and getting to eat a Monte Cristo. What was not to love about a sandwich that was fried and came with jelly? From where I live now, I have to drive to Chicago to find a department store with a "tea room." Reservations are needed and base price is about $30 a person. These days who needs a tea room in a department store? Everyone just eats Panda Express at the food court.

One of the classic's from my family's recipe box is Franklin Simon's Frozen Fruit Salad, served in the tea rooms in the now-defunct chain's department stores--one of which was apparently a favorite female-dining destination when my family lived in Atlanta. (We moved to Phoenix when I was five.) I am sure I never ate the salad while living in Atlanta. Instead the frozen fruit salad became a staple of summer life in Phoenix when I was growing up.

My mother made a batch and froze it either in clean, dry, paper, quart milk cartons, or Pringles cans that had the bottoms removed and replaced with several layers of aluminum foil taped in place to keep them from leaking. She made it when all my siblings came home with their young families in the summer, or when she had a special bridge party or luncheon. After a quick bath under the warm water tap, the milk carton was sliced open along the side or the fruit salad pushed out of the Pringles can like a giant popsicle and sliced. Frozen fruit salad accompanied barbecued pork or finger sandwiches equally well. When I got married 25 years ago, the recipe came with me to show up on summer menus.

Recently, my husband asked me to make it since we haven't had it in a long time. Since my son was bringing college friends over for an Easter barbecue, it seemed like the perfect time to make some. I love a salad that can be made ahead of time, and it was sure to be a novelty item on the menu.

Let's be honest: there are a lot of favorites that fell off our household menu rotation because neither of the children would eat them. Neither of my children would eat the frozen fruit salad because: A) it has nuts in it, and B) it is made with fruit--some of it even fresh. My daughter is going through a phase where she will eat almost only packaged food. I have tried to convince her that a banana comes in a package, but no luck. Neither of them eat much in the way of fresh fruit or vegetables, and prefer homemade menu items high in fat and/or sugar. Food that is handed to them through a window is best. (Kitchen windows don't count.) But because I was feeding other people's children, and because the salad is frozen and keeps well, I dug out the recipe.

Franklin Simon's Frozen Fruit Salad

As printed in the Avondale Garden Club recipe collection, You Asked For It, Avondale Estates, GA, 1957. Ingredients and quantities have been updated to reflect the kitchen 50 years later. The recipe takes about an hour to prepare from start to freezer.

• 1/2 cup cake flour (I substitute regular flour, using 1 tablespoon less)
• 1 rounded cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup pineapple juice (almost the exact amount from the following can of tidbits)
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice (I have also used lime, grapefruit, and orange)
• 1 16-oz can of pineapple tidbits
• 1 16-oz can of dark cherries in their juice
• 1 16-oz can of sliced peaches in their juice
• 4 tablespoons maraschino cherries
• 3 small ripe bananas (firm ripe, not mushy ripe)
• 3/4 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup whipping cream

In a heavy saucepan, mix the flour, sugar, salt with a whisk. Over low heat, add the pineapple and lemon juice. Stir until smooth. Cook, stirring constantly, over low heat until the mixture thickens and becomes somewhat translucent. This takes at least 20 minutes. Take the pan off the heat.

Beat the egg in a bowl or a glass measuring cup, and put a small dollop of the thick hot mixture into the egg, stirring to mix well. The idea is to bring the egg gradually up to the temperature of the hot mixture because if  you just stir the cold egg into the hot mixture, it will scramble. Keep adding dollops. Once the egg is hot (you've added at least as much mixture as you had egg), whisk it into the mixture in the sauce pan.

At this point, you need to cool the mixture. I put it in an ice bath in the sink, being careful not to get water into the mixture, and whisking it occasionally to help it cool. Use this time to drain and chop the cherries in half, the peaches into bite-size pieces, and to chop the pecans and slice the bananas. Whip the cream into stiff peaks.

By this time the mixture is cool to the touch. Put it into a large bowl, and stir in the drained fruit and nuts. Fold in the whipped cream. When all the ingredients are combined, put the mixture into a 9X13 Pyrex baking dish that has been sprayed lightly with Pam. Press a sheet of plastic wrap into the top of the salad, and put it in the freezer to firm up for at least 24 hours. Then clean up the kitchen, because you will have bowls and spatulas and measuring spoons and a sticky pan to deal with. The recipe as printed in the Avondale Garden Club recipe guide also includes ingredient lists for making the fruit salad in bulk batches for up to 112 people--let me know if you are going to make that much and I will e-mail them to you. This fruit salad would be perfect with pimento cheese sandwiches for a bridal or baby shower.

All of the frozen fruit salad recipes I could find from department stores menus of the past were based on cream cheese. I think the whipped cream makes this salad more like a fruity ice cream. My husband prefers his as dessert, while I prefer to eat mine along with whatever else we are having. We are slowly finishing up the fruit salad since neither of the children will eat the leftovers. No complaints here!

Plain and Simple

A few weeks ago, my friend Cheryl assembled a group of fifteen friends at Simone's Plain and Simple, http://www.simoneplainandsimple.com/index.html , in Wellman, Iowa for dinner. It was Cheryl's birthday, and the guests brought lots of wine and good cheer. Simone made us a traditional French meal from mostly local fresh ingredients.

We started off with an appetizer course, with Simone bringing each item out one at a time over the period of about an hour. Cold crab legs with a mayonnaise dipping sauce, a platter of hors d'ouevres such as cherry tomato halves and slices of cucumber topped with chevre and chives. There was bowl of olives Nicoise with oil and fresh garlic, and a fabulous platter of Simone's famous Fougasse made with walnuts and herbs. Simone explained that in France, Fougasse is a symbol of friendship, a perfect appetizer for the group--all of whom knew Cheryl, but not necessarily each other.  My favorite appetizer was the fresh morels, sauteed slightly in butter, lots of butter, and served on a thin round of crisp bread.  The morels tasted like spring--fresh and earthly--like the garden smells when you first turn it over after winter.

The first seated course was fresh asparagus for Simone's garden. It was cooked with fresh ginger and butter. Ginger and asparagus are made to go together, and several people at the table commented that it was a perfect pairing. I used a piece of bread from the passed basket to make sure I got all the butter off my plate. More wine went around.

The entree was next: grass fed beef with rhubarb sauce, and roasted new potatoes. The beef was from local Wallace Farms, the rhubarb from Simone's garden. Before we sampled the slices of beef, Simone explained that it was grass fed and that we would be able to taste the difference from the beef we usually ate. She was right--a kind of an earthly flavor highlighted the buttery beef. It was served with a wonderful horseradish sauce served straight out of the jar, made locally by the Amish in Stringtown.

The next course violated the local food rule: Simone passed a cheese board of French cheeses served with yet more of her fabulous bread--a buttery Brie, a gorgeous veiny blue cheese, a nice goat cheese--and crisp pear slices: "What can I say? French cheese are the best!" Everyone assumed it was desert and ate up. The cheese board went around the table twice.

Then Simone served the real dessert: chocolate hazelnut cake with whipped cream. With all the bottles of wine that had been opened all evening, I only wished we had had coffee with the cake. By that point, I felt a bit woozy.

The food was fabulous, the company funny and entertaining. And we drank all of Cheryl's bottles of birthday wine. But the thing I noticed most about the evening was the portion sizes. Had my mother cooked the same sort of meal for fifteen guests, the platter of buttered asparagus would have been heaped with several bunches worth of green spears. She would have cooked an entire side of beef (only a slight exaggeration).  Simone's portions were plenty, but not bountiful by American standards. I certainly did not want for food, but I noticed that having the food served in courses made a difference in the way I ate and appreciated it.

With the different servings of appetizers, I could taste and notice each one.  That one piece of crisp French bread with the sauteed, buttered morel on top, was bite of heaven. I was lucky enough--barely--to get a second one.  The platter of asparagus went around the table twice, each time I savored several spears with their ginger and butter. The service was a far cry from my last dinner party, where the food was served "family style''--all on the table at once--and everyone heaped their plates with food, more than once.

No wonder so many Americans are overweight.