Scarlet Fruit Salad with Greek Yoghurt

This luscious salad celebrates all the glorious reds of autumn fruits in South Africa. Plums, prickly pears, red grapes, raspberries and pomegranate seeds are here, plus a few triangles of startling-magenta dragon fruit, which I'm pretty sure is not grown in this country.  Still, I couldn't resist adding them: they may taste disappointingly insipid, but they are real lookers in a fruit salad.

Scarlet Fruit Salad with Greek Yoghurt

I have a slight horror of multicoloured fruit salads, particularly the finely sliced extravaganzas that were such a hit during the health-food revolution of the late Seventies.  I appreciated the idea of the fruit salads my mum prepared with such devotion, but the furry slices of banana and the cubes of paw-paw and the triangles of apple browning in their juices made my tastebuds shrivel, particularly if the salad had been sulking in the fridge overnight.  

Also, someone told me a story that made my toes curl.  A boy scout was charged with the task of making fruit salad for his pack.  "Please clean your nails before you begin," asked the scout master. "Oh, don't worry about that," replied the boy. "By the time I'm finished chopping and mixing all the fruit, my nails will be beautifully clean."

This salad is a red version of my Black Fruit Salad, featured in my cookbook and here (left) in a magazine whose name I can't remember.  

Scarlet Fruit Salad with Greek Yoghurt

4 firm red plums, stones removed, halved and sliced into crescents
250 g raspberries
250 g strawberries, hulled and halved
4 red prickly pears, chilled, peeled and cut into crescents
the seeds of a pomegranate
250 g red grapes, halved and depipped
a small dragon fruit, peeled and cut into triangles [optional]
2 Tbsp (30 ml) icing sugar, or more, to taste
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice
1 cup (250 ml) thick creamy Greek yoghurt

Put all the fruit pieces in a big bowl.  Strew the icing sugar over the fruit, add a spritz of lemon juice and toss gently to combine.  Taste the mixture - if it's very sweet, add a little more lemon juice.

Chill the fruit for an hour or two, or until a light syrup has formed at the bottom of the bowl.  Serve in pretty bowls or glasses, topped with dollops of very cold and creamy Greek yoghurt, or whipped cream, or good vanilla ice cream.  Or you might like to try the voluptuous topping I've used for my black fruit salad - crème fraîche or mascarpone mixed with a little brown sugar and vanilla extract.

Serves 6

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Black Fruit Salad with Figs and Brown-Sugar Crème Fraîche

Figs are in high season in the Cape now, and my goodness they are luscious things. We had a fig tree in our garden when we were children, and every time I taste a fresh fig I'm reminded of standing under that tree inhaling the musky perfume of sun-warmed green figs and marvelling at the sticky white sap that welled from the stalks.

Actually, the figs of my childhood are not a patch on the beautiful figs in the shops now:  with their dusty purplish-black skins and gorgeous coral-coloured flesh, they look and taste just  irresistible. These dark figs are grown in the Paarl area, I believe, while the bulk of South Africa's fig crop comes from the Klein Karoo region.

Also in season in the Cape are blackberries, blueberries and table grapes, so I've combined them with figs to make this mysterious-looking black (well, mostly black) fruit salad.   The first time I made it (and photographed it) I left it undressed; the second time, I tossed it with a little lemon juice and icing sugar, which gave the fruit a lovely zingy gloss.

Mix the brown sugar with the cream just before you serve the salad, so it stays thick and retains a crunch: if you make it in advance the sugar will dissolve and liquefy the cream. Chill all the fruit before you make the salad.

Black Fruit Salad with Brown-Sugar Crème Fraîche

1 big bunch sweet black grapes, halved and deseeded
1 cup (250 ml) blackberries
1 cup (250 ml)blueberries
4 purple figs, quartered
1 Tbsp (15 ml) icing sugar
the juice of half a lemon
1 cup (250 ml) crème fraîche or mascarpone
1 tsp (5 ml) pure vanilla extract
2 Tbsp (30 ml) brown sugar

Combine the fruit in a bowl and stir in the icing sugar and lemon juice. Place in the fridge for 10 minutes. Just before you serve the salad, mix together the crème fraîche, vanilla and brown sugar. Divide the salad into four bowls and place a dollop of crème fraîche over each portion.

Serves 4.

Note: the redcurrants adorning this salad come straight from my deep freezer: they're locally grown redcurrants, which you can read about here.

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Prickly Pear and Grape Salad with Frozen Rosemary Sugar

I don't know why prickly pears aren't more popular in this country. With their sweet perfumed taste, an elusive mixture of kiwi fruit and watermelon, and their gorgeous nubbly seeds, they are a rare treat in midsummer.

Prickly Pear and Grape Salad with Frozen Rosemary Sugar

My childhood friend Margaret, who lived on a smallholding near ours, introduced me to prickly pears, which grew on a towering cactus behind the barn.  I didn't believe her when she said you could eat the fruit from this plant, with its huge, frightening paddle-shaped leaves, so she put on some gardening gloves and picked a basketful.

She warned me not to touch them:  I did, of course, and later spent hours tweezing the little hairs from my fingertips. The next most important thing, Margaret, aged 8, told me, was that prickly pears should always be served ice-cold, and I have followed this instruction all my life.  I also still use her method of peeling the fruit, using a knife and fork (see recipe, below).

Those pears were a lovely green; these - from my local Pick 'n Pay - are an arresting deep pink that is so intense that my poor cheapie camera broke into a sweat trying to focus on them in poor light (hence the crappy picture).

In this recipe I have combined the pears with with tart, sweet, snappy seedless grapes - coming into high season in the Cape - and a dusting of sugar whizzed up with frozen rosemary needles.  I spied the frozen rosemary while I was rummaging in the freezer for the prickly pears, which I'd put there to cool off, and the combination of sweet pear with a hint of resiny rosemary is just delicious.

Prickly Pear and Grape Salad with Frozen Rosemary Sugar

10 ripe prickly pears [cactus pears]
a big bunch of crisp seedless red grapes
1/2 cup (125 ml) granulated white sugar
2 sprigs fresh rosemary, frozen overnight
the juice of half a lemon

Chill the pears by placing them in the freezer for 45 minutes (or overnight in the fridge). Push a fork into the flesh of each pear to secure it and cut off the top and bottom. Now, using a sharp knife, divide the skin of each pear into four quarters lengthways, cutting about 1 mm deep.

Using another fork, peel away each section of skin, which will come away easily if the pears are fully ripe.  Slice into discs. Halve the grapes and place all the fruit on a chilled platter. Sprinkle with the lemon juice and toss gently.

To make the rosemary sugar, strip the rosemary needles quickly from their stalks (they thaw fast) and place them with the sugar into the small chopping/coffee-grinding attachment on a blender (or use a mortar and pestle). Quickly blitz or pound to a fine dust. Don't worry if a few stray needles remain intact.  Take the dish to the table and serve the 'dust' separately: if you put it on beforehand, it will dissolve into the salad.

Serves 6 as a dessert.

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Impala goes Platinum -- the best fruit and veggie shop in SA? And, a recipe for Red Fruit Salad

Have you ever shopped at Impala Fruiterers in Northcliff, Johannesburg? What a banquet for the senses. I've only ever seen more beautiful fresh produce at a market in Italy. You can get anything - anything - at Impala: the crispiest, greenest organic lettuces and leaves, the most pungent herbs, the juiciest seasonal fruit, the ripest tomatoes and avocados, not to mention a huge array of fresh nuts, dried fruit, olive oils, preserves, grains and pulses. And a host of seasonal fruits and veggies that you won't see on the shelves of Pick 'n Pay: fat bulbs of fennel, kohlrabi, celeriac, pomegranates, prickly pears, starfruit, quinces, fresh porcini mushrooms, to mention a few. The produce isn't expensive: in fact, it's so reasonable that Woolies should hang their heads in shame.

I bought a gigantic carton of seasonal goodies today, for a mere R280. Most delicious of all are huge, juicy, ruby-red plums that are the sweetest I've ever tasted, and a big bag of purply catawba grapes. There is something about the taste of a catawba that just sends me into raptures: if you don't know what I'm talking about, try to remember the musky sweetness of the grapes you plucked off a vine growing over someone's stoep (that's a veranda) twenty years ago. In all likelihood, it was a catawba grape. This is the taste of dusty summer days and sun-warmed slasto patios (remember slasto?), a taste so evocative of my farm childhood that biting into one of these grapes actually brought a lump to my throat.

In fact, the produceI bought today was so utterly beautiful that I couldn't resist taking about 1000 photographs.

What my fruit bowl looks like now.














What my other fruit bowl looks like now. The beautiful smoke-fired platter is made by my uncle David Walters, master potter of Franschhoek.



























Had enough of gratuitous fruit and vegetable pictures? Okay, here's a recipe. Well, not really a recipe, but what I did with some of the fruit I bought. (If you've read my last post, you'll know that I'm craving red food at the moment). Sorry the picture's a bit blurry: it was getting dark.


Red Fruit Salad

- ripe red plums, pipped and cut into eighths
- seedless red or black grapes
- pomegranate seeds (as IF you have these in your fridge. I've ranted at length about recipes that call for exotic ingredients already. Sorry.)
- frozen cranberries (Ditto. But look, I had them in my freezer. Use strawberries or raspberries, or even tinned black cherries, instead)
- little cubes of watermelon
- 1 T (15 ml) sugar
- juice of half a lemon
- fresh mint or lemon balm leaves

Tenderly combine all the fruit in a bowl. Sprinkle with the sugar and lemon juice, and tuck the lemon balm leaves into the salad. Chill for at least an hour. Serve with cream.

A fruit salad of these gorgeous plums would be delicious with this spicy sugar syrup. I didn't have time to make syrup, but if there are any plums left over tomorrow (hope springs eternal) they will find themselves dressed in this:

Spicy Sugar Syrup

1 cup (250 ml) white sugar
1 cup (250 ml) water
1 star anise
1 stick cinnamon
a long shaving of lemon zest

Put the sugar and water in a saucepan and heat gently, swirling the pot occasionally (don't stir it). When the mixture boils, add the remaining ingredients, turn down the heat a little and simmer for fifteen minutes. Set aside and allow to cool completely. Strain the syrup over the plums. Chill well before serving.

There are endless variations on this recipe. You could add any of the following ( in appropriate flavour combinations): grated fresh ginger, a vanilla pod, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf, crushed coriander or cardamom seeds (odd, but it works), orange zest, white wine, rooibos tea, lemon grass, a sprig of thyme or rosemary, rose water or a few whole cloves. Print Friendly