|Alternative names||Fruit cocktail, fruit cup|
|Course||Appetizer, dessert, snack, main meal|
|Main ingredients||Fruit, fruit juice or syrup|
|Cookbook:Fruit salad Fruit salad|
Fruit salad is a dish consisting of various kinds of fruit, sometimes served in a liquid, either in their own juices or a syrup. When served as an appetizer or as a dessert, a fruit salad is sometimes known as a fruit cocktail or fruit cup. In different forms fruit salad can be served as an appetizer, a side-salad, or a dessert.
There are a number of home recipes for fruit salad that contain different kinds of fruit, or that use a different kind of sauce other than the fruit's own juice or syrup. Common ingredients used in fruit salads include strawberries, pineapple, honeydew, watermelon, grapes, banana, and kiwifruit. Various recipes may call for the addition of nuts, fruit juices, certain vegetables, yogurt, or other ingredients.
One variation is a Waldorf-style fruit salad, which uses a mayonnaise-based sauce. Other recipes use sour cream (such as in ambrosia), yogurt or even mustard as the primary sauce ingredient. An ever-popular variation also uses whipped cream mixed in with many varieties of fruits (usually a mixture of berries), and also often include miniature marshmallows. Rojak, a Malaysian fruit salad, uses a spicy sauce with peanuts and shrimp paste. In the Philippines, fruit salads are popular party and holiday fare, usually made with buko, or young coconut, and condensed milk in addition to other canned or fresh fruit.
Mexico has popular variation of the fruit salad called Bionico which consists various fruits drenched in condensed milk and sour cream mix.
A fruit salad ice cream is also commonly manufactured, with small pieces of real fruit embedded in, flavored either with juices from concentrate, fruit extracts, or artificial chemicals.
Fruit cocktail is often sold canned and is a staple of cafeterias, but can also be made fresh. The use of the word "cocktail" in the name does not mean that it contains alcohol, but refers to the secondary definition "An appetizer made by combining pieces of food, such as fruit or seafood". Fruit cocktail is sometimes used to make pruno.
In the United States, the USDA stipulates that canned "fruit cocktail" must contain a certain percentage distribution of pears, grapes, cherries, peaches, and pineapples to be marketed as fruit cocktail. It must contain fruits in the following range of percentages:
- 30% to 50% diced peaches, any yellow variety
- 25% to 45% diced pears, any variety
- 6% to 16% diced pineapple, any variety
- 6% to 20% whole grapes, any seedless variety
- Few to no cherry halves, any light sweet or artificial red variety (like maraschino cherries)
Both William Vere Cruess of the University of California, Berkeley and Herbert Gray of the Barron-Gray Packing Company of San Jose, California have been credited with the invention of fruit cocktail. Canned fruit cocktail and canned fruit salad are similar, but fruit salad contains larger fruit while fruit cocktail is diced.
In popular culture
"Fruit-salad" is also a slang term used for medals on a soldiers uniform, e.g. "Look at the fruit-salad on that colonel." The term refers to the bright colors of a high percentage of the ribbons that usually go with medals.
- "Watermelon Salad: A Different kind of fruit salad". Watermelon Salad. Retrieved 21 April 2012.
- "Very Basic Fruit Salad". Food.com. 10 March 2008. Retrieved 21 April 2012.
- "Fruit Product Sheets". US Department of Agriculture. p. 41. Retrieved 21 April 2012.
- USDA's Grading Manual for Canned Fruit Cocktail
- Cruess, William (Vere) in The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Cruess,+William
- History San José: Cannery Life: The Mystery of Fruit Cocktail: http://www.historysanjose.org/cannerylife/through-the-years/1917-1966/mechanization/fruit-cocktail.html
- David Arthey, P. R. Ashurst Fruit Processing Published by Springer, 1996 p. 151 ISBN 0-7514-0039-4, ISBN 978-0-7514-0039-7, 248 pages preview: http://books.google.com/books?id=tlrPylXG6WYC&pg=PA151&dq=fruit+salad+fruit+cocktail#PPA151,M1
- "Mystique Of Military Coloured Ribbons". New Straits Times. May 21, 1996. Retrieved August 13, 2010.[dead link]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fruit salads.|