Fruit Salad Recipes:
Often nestled among a host of traditional Christmas dishes on the Southern sideboard is a big crystal bowl of ambrosia. This "food of the gods" in its purest form is simplicity itself--fresh oranges layered with flakes of coconut.
"People who add grapefruit, pineapple, grapes, and bananas, and Lord knows what else to ambrosia simply don't understand ambrosia," proclaims Martha Pearl Villas in My Mother's Southern Desserts (Morrow Cookbooks, $27) written by her son, James. Her recipe has just four ingredients: oranges, coconut, sugar, and orange juice. Log on to a recipe chat room though, and you'll find that people include all sorts of ingredients. In our Test Kitchens, while indulging in various bowls of goodness, the purist-orange-coconut coalition looked on in disbelief at the pro-pineapple-ites and the grapefruit groupies. Finally, we were all content with this one and the shortcut version.
The be-all and end-all of ambrosia is that it is what you want it to be. Personalizing it with whipped cream, pistachios, marshmallows, dried cranberries, or bright red maraschino cherries doesn't make it wrong--it makes it yours.
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