Nearly Naked Fruit Salad

Sometimes the food is so good, it can proudly go naked, or at least scantily clad. So it was with the beautiful fruit salad my sisters brought to my house for a Christmas Day brunch. We had a ham and broccoli quiche and pumpkin muffins and this masterpiece of a fruit salad. The mélange of colors, textures and tastes, all tumbling around together. Gorgeous looking and even better tasting.

Guess the source of this masterpiece? Julia. I have Julia on the brain this week since I’m halfway through reading As Always, Julia , the Letters of Julia Child and Avis Devoto.  Editor Joan Reardon does a masterful job of sequencing the letters and letting us peak into not just the friendship between these two amazing women, but the politics of the time, their marriages, their social lives, the publishing world . . . . and the food! I highly recommend this read.

My sister Lynn said she has been using a very simple fruit dressing (or “flavoring” as Julia labels it) she got from “The Way to Cook” and has been using it for over twenty years. She came upon it in near desperation, though. As she puts it, she and her husband were planning a big back-yard “to-do” and she had hollowed out a watermelon to hold her fruit. The fruit, however, was mediocre and she needed to salvage the investment. Enter Julia. (This is why we have our libraries of cookbooks!)

This Christmas, Lynn picked a beautiful mix of fresh fruit -- grapefruit, kiwi, pineapple, oranges, red and white grapes, blackberries, blueberries, honeydew melon, pomegranates and – my personal favorite – red raspberries. She wisely kept the red raspberries separate from the rest of the fruit until right before serving, to protect them an over vigorous toss, and mashing. I didn’t know until I tasted it, though, that it did have a light and simple dressing.   Simple. Subtle.  Perfect.

Like sheer organza.

The Immense Fruit Bowl
From Julia Child’s “The Way to Cook”

The Flavoring
½ cup sugar
¼ cup freshly squeezed lime juice
¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
Macerating the fruits – One hour before serving. Fold the fruits in a serving bowl with the sugar and juices. Refrigerate, folding gently several more times.

That’s it!