Funeral Salad

In the Mid-West, major life events require food.  Someone is born, you eat. Someone marries, you eat.  Someone dies…that’s right, you eat.  Funerary potlucks, usually take place in a church basements, with female parishioners being pressed into service to provide dishes that accomplice cold cut platters and bread sponsored by the deceased loved ones.  By taxonomy, this is a Fruit Salad, this version however is healthful in name only.

Core Ingredients

• Multiple cans of canned fruit packed in heavy syrup
• Canned pie filling
• Flair ingredients (added at the creators discretion, or lack thereof)

The basic procedure is simple: Open cans, drain liquid, dump into a large bowl, and mix. The sugar content of this dish is an attempt at homicide in and of itself. The real atrocity comes in the myriad of ways in which each individual offender can add their own signature flair.

First: The canned fruit…in heavy syrup.  The contents of that little can started its long journey to your local grocery store as a perfectly happy, delicious and nutritious little peach, grape, or pineapple.  It blossomed and fed itself on water and sunshine, until it was just beginning to ripen. Then, it was torn from its branch, sanitized, peeled, chopped, and boiled in sugar sluice with preservatives and food coloring added to get just the right shade of grey.  Then, to make sure that no hint of nutrition could survive, it was compressed in to cans and sealed under intense heat and pressure to ensure that it would remain shelf stable for at least three years.  Whatever is left after all of this, one cannot say, but only a crime scene investigator could determine if it is still fruit.

Second: If the description of the industrial canning of fruit didn’t frighten you, this should!  Take the same process as above, but triple the sugar and additives, and lengthen the boiling time until it has congealed the fruit into a viscous, spooky secretion.

Third: Flair.  Although creativity is important to creating memorable dishes, not every memory is pleasant.  A cook has a responsibility to those who eat their food. While some individuals restrain themselves to a few token banana slices or halved grapes, most tend to compound their felonies by adding anything from their stash of fat-filled and sugar-coated contraband.  Nothing that is served with marshmallows, snowflake coconut, candied nuts, and whipped topping, deserves to be called salad!

Calling this dish "Fruit Salad" borders on slander.  The main offense is sugar, lots and lots of processed sugar.  Preserving fruit removes much of its natural sugars.  Processed sugar is added in an attempt to make the end result appealing.  This dish consists of at least two if not three ingredients that have been "sugar-preserved."   Perhaps a funeral luncheon is the only appropriate place to serve this dish.  It might prove to be a comfort to a grieving family to know that by eating food like this, they will all soon be reunited with the dearly departed in that Diabetes Clinic in the sky.

The appeal of fruit salad is its freshness and its simplicity, you don't need a can opener to achieve this.  Select the freshest fruits available, clean them, chop them as necessary, and combine them with a bit of lemon juice to prevent oxidation.  At the height of the produce season, nothing more is required.  If you feel you do need a dressing of some kind, consider a dollop of honey and yogurt, or a reduction of fruit juice. For your flair, try some sprigs of mint.


Potluck Crime:  Aiding and Diabetic, Fruit Cupability