It is an easy-to-make dessert that is sure to impress. Shields sees original ambrosia, without a binder or a riot of ingredients, as the gold standard: “There is a simplicity to it that’s just so elegant.This Fruit Salad with Whipped Cream is bright and refreshing. For her own table, she has added pecans, but never a binder. “I did the cutting up.”ĭupree has included tweaked versions of ambrosia in some of her books, including one with coconut, cherries and bananas. “We had a relative who sent us fresh oranges,” she said. The 83-year-old’s strongest girlhood ambrosia memories are from the fall and winter holidays, when it was served as a side dish. Multiple Beard-winner Nathalie Dupree, who has written 14 cookbooks and appeared on numerous food TV shows, grew up in Virginia. “Just one bite can take me right back to Nana’s kitchen.” “Growing up in Ohio, my Nana often made simple Midwestern fluff ‘salads’ for holidays such as Easter and Thanksgiving,” said Johnston, who lives in Cleveland. It’s loaded with pineapple, mandarin oranges, coconut and those bagged miniature fruit-flavored marshmallows. Jamie Johnston, who runs the food blog My Baking Addiction, re-created her childhood ambrosia salad for the site. “It started as one of the Gilded Age dishes,” he said.Īmbrosia quickly trickled down to the middle classes with the rise of easily obtainable processed coconut and year-round access to oranges and pineapples. Fresh oranges, meanwhile, were considered a winter treat until the orange belt began mass distribution. Shields said key to the spread of ambrosia was the invention of a machine to process coconut meat. The dish can be a gross-out for some, with its unusual look and texture, but it began as an exotic luxury using hard-to-find ingredients. The idea that Missouri is the first hotbed of ambrosia is a kind of odd one, but there are lots of reports on usually all women’s celebrations having a supper in which ambrosia and ice cream are being served.” “In the latter 1870s, the earliest of those sorts of stories actually all come from Missouri, for some reason. “Ambrosia starts popping up in newspaper stories on local parties,” he said. David Shields, a culinary historian, author and professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, has another theory. Its ties to the South are strong, though some believe it began in Vermont or elsewhere in New England. “I make it the way that my family made it, which doesn’t have marshmallows because we didn’t like them.”Īmbrosia was so named for the food of the Greek and Roman gods. “There’s so many different ways to do it,” Pelosi said of ambrosia salad. It was Aunt Jessie, Pelosi said, who called her green concoction made with instant pistachio pudding ambrosia salad rather than Watergate salad, as such a thing is more commonly known because, one story goes, it rose in popularity during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. She led him into a vast, more contemporary world of fluff salads made with boxed instant puddings and powdered colored gelatin. Whipped cream, cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, mayo? In Brooklyn, “Let’s Eat” cookbook writer and food influencer Dan Pelosi relied on his Aunt Jessie to lead the way on ambrosia salad. Marshmallows: The big ones or the miniatures? The white ones or the multicolored pastels? Leave out? Maraschino cherries: Dump in wet, risking a pink tinge to the end result? Drain and pat dry? Hard pass altogether? It’s ambrosia salad when it takes a prideful spot on the table during the main course.Ĭoconut: Use it or forget it? Fresh or pre-shredded? Toasted or not?įruit: Canned or fresh? One type or several? Drain or use the juices? Willis melds her Southern roots and French culinary training in her cookbooks, including “Bon Appétit, Y’all.”įeelings run hot all along the ambrosia spectrum, starting with the name. I’ve probably had ambrosia every year of my 56 years.”Īficionados like Willis feel strongly about their ambrosia, sometimes relying on recipes passed down within families for generations. Ambrosia has never gone out of fashion in the South. “Classic ambrosia consists of oranges and coconut, then sugar to taste,” said James Beard Award-winning chef Virginia Willis in Atlanta. The whole shebang, say purists, is nothing less than an abomination. She tops the pile with marshmallows and cherries. Joyce’s version, on the other hand, is far busier, involving pineapple, peaches, oranges, heavy cream, yogurt, cherry juice, toasted coconut and chopped pecans.
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