My Meals are on Wheels

One of America’s Favorites – Fruit Salad

A plate of fruit salad made of pear, satsuma mandarin, kiwifruit, passion fruit, pomegranate seeds, and Greek yogurt mixed with honey, cardamom and vanilla sugar.

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. A variation on fruit salad 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

There is also an extended variety of fruit salads in Moroccan cuisine, often as part of a kemia, a selection of appetizers or small dishes analogous to Spanish tapas or eastern Mediterranean mezze.

Fruit salad with kiwifruit, strawberries, blueberries, pineapples, bananas, and oranges

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
*2% to 6% cherry halves, any light sweet or artificially colored 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. Commercially, the fruit used was healthy but cosmetically damaged, such as a peach or pear that was bruised on one side. The bruised parts would be cut away and discarded, and the rest would be diced into small pieces.