I can’t think of many American dishes I find more nasty than Ambrosia, often called ambrosia salad. I don’t even understand why this dish exists. It is a sweet-on-sweet and soft-on-soft travesty. I can barely look at it, let alone choke it down. And yet, I have a feeling that the original Ambrosia was quite nice. It seems to have come about in 1867 in one of the many white southern cookbooks actually written by an enslaved black woman.
Today’s ambrosia is a fruit-salad medley of pineapple, mandarin orange slices, coconut, and either mayonnaise, whipped cream (or whipped topping), sour cream, cream cheese, or… whatever seems creamy enough.
Sometimes, maraschino cherries are added (not the real ones) as well as bananas, grapes, pecans, and who knows what else. The version I’m most familiar with uses marshmallows and whipped topping. This may be the most awful of the awful, but I can’t imagine any version of this being fit for the Gods.
Ambrosia — The Food of the Gods
We think of the mythical Ambrosia as the food of the Gods on Mount Olympus (the Gods of the Ancient Greeks). Ambrosia, along with nectar, sustains the Gods and maintains their immortality. This food was often depicted as a solid, but sometimes as a liquid or some combination of the two. The idea has roots in Indian mythology, where ambrosia or Soma was an elixir that gave gods immortality but could also restore life or cure diseases.
It was said that any mortal who was given ambrosia would never die from an unnatural death but would instead live out their full years and only die naturally.
The mythical ambrosia sounds better than the American version, I must say. However, the original recipe for ambrosia was much simpler and may have been if not delicious, at least edible.
The earliest recipe that I’ve been able to find is from the 1867 book Dixie Cookery by Maria Massey Barringer. As was the fashion of the day, the full title was more long-winded: Dixie Cookery: Or How I Managed My Table for Twelve Years, A Practical Cookbook for Southern Housekeepers.
The recipe was very simple and straightforward, with only a few ingredients rather than everything sweet you happen to have on hand.
This original Ambrosia recipe from 1867 was nothing more than a layered salad of pulped oranges (the flesh removed from the sections), and grated coconut that had been sweetened. In those days, packaged dried coconut and Mandarin oranges were not available.
The title of the cookbook is quite ironic since it is almost certain that Mrs. Barringer never managed her table and was quite well-to-do enough that many of the ingredients she called for were too expensive to be considered ‘practical.’ Her Ambrosia is an example of this since mandarin oranges and coconuts would probably have been out of reach for all but the most wealthy Americans.
Recounted in American Food: A Not-So-Serious History is Barringer’s idea of a “simple” meal, from a letter she wrote to her sister:
I had a few minutes talk with Ellen (the cook) who told me she had just taken from the oven a large loaf of rolls and one of our largest hams and these supplemented by poultry and vegetables and a tipsy cake pudding and fruits with cream furnished the simple dinner, ready in a half hour after their arrival.
Sounds like Thanksgiving dinner in many households. Regardless, if this is a true example of the original Ambrosia dessert, it seems much more reasonable and perhaps tastier than today’s decadent and ultra-processed version.
It was probably Ellen, her cook, who actually wrote, or at least recited the recipes in the book despite the protestations of the ‘author’ at the book’s opening, explaining the exhaustive duties of the pre-civil war wealthy white woman who had to, gulp, teach her cooks everything.
Diatribes aside, as with most recipes given in cookbooks of the day, there are no amounts given and only the most sketchy instructions.
Original Ambrosia Recipe
Here is the complete recipe from the book:
Grate the white part of the coconut, sweeten with a little sugar, and place in a glass bowl, in alternate layers with pulped oranges, having a layer of coconut on top. Serve in ice cream plates or saucers.
As Rachel Wharton points out in the aforementioned American Food, while today we would just place the orange segments in a dish and layer with sugar and coconut, the instructions here probably intend us to remove all the peel and pith and slightly mush up or macerate the pulp. I would suggest that this entails removing the membranes around the segments, or digging out the pulp as you would that of a grapefruit. The result should be much more pleasant than modern-day Ambrosia. It is something people today do not take the trouble to do nearly often enough. You’ll find any salad or dessert that uses oranges will be much more pleasant if you follow Mrs. Barringer’s, or rather Ellen’s, instructions.
Most original Ambrosia recipes that followed in subsequent cookbooks were similar.
