A “fruit salad” to amurricans is a pile of fruit flavored gelatin or whipping cream with a bunch of random bite-sized fruits or fruit chunks within. The gelatin version, like all the gelatinous culinary horrors of yesteryear, were a kind of display food. The ideal was a shining mound of shaped gelatin, within which you could see delicate wonders suspended in an aeternal faerie danse.
There are images in art that evoke this visual to me. Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and other works in that genre, the design of tanks at aquariums, the hordes of winged babies in El Greco and other baroque art, the hordes of ghouls and skeletons and yokai in horror comic art or that “Night on Bald Mountain” part in Fantasia, toy and candy vending machines, sets of action figures and dolls… You’ll notice this getting away from art into the artificial. Piles of trash, gardens, tide pools, roadside puddles or culverts with floating litter…
When I was a child I’d dream sometimes of what it would be like to be underwater. Can’t swim, can’t breathe, gonna die. I know I’d visited a aquarium or two and I believe I was around eleven years old when I read Jaws. Of course there were fish everywhere, and some of those fish were sharks. They would eventually eat me alive, or dead if I’d been lucky enough to drown by that point.
There was a time around age ten when I would be awake half the night imagining monsters into every ambiguous shape of laundry or toys on the floor, seeing the Twilight Zone airplane gremlin in every rainy window, imagining a tall movie monster in the closet or any given hiding space. I was living in a gelatin salad of monsters.
I suspect it was precipitated by watching cheap scifi and horror movies and TV shows. I do not know what managed to end it. Maybe whatever parent had to come give me the business managed to humiliate me hard enough that it broke the spell. I don’t even know how long that was happening. Was it weeks? Months? Pretty sure it was less than a year, in all.
Anyway, it’s all in good fun now. Let Halloween never end.
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The definition of fruit salad varies by locations in the US. In my neck of the woods, it’s usually a variety of fruit chunks (usually cantaloupe and/or watermelon), often with one or more strawberries/blueberries/raspberries/blackberries. Sometimes there are no watermelon or cantaloupe chunks. Sometimes there’s slices of banana. No whipped cream or gelatin.
In the midwest, I keep hearing, it’s a gallon of mayo with shreds of fruit.
@1 Katydid
What you’ve described is what I am used to as well. Mostly a melon (water, honeydew, canta) and berries. Sometimes pineapple, rarely banana. If it’s at a luncheon of some sort, I can guarantee that the cantaloupe will not be ripe. Sometimes it’s as crunchy as an apple. On rare occasions I have also seen mango added.
@ jimf; when I lived in Hawaii, fruit salad was usually mango, kiwi, pineapple, and banana, and sometimes a scattering of sliced maraschino cherries. I agree about the unripe cantaloupe at events! I would love mango in a fruit salad, but finding one that’s ripe would be a problem where I live. Supermarket mangoes are often disappointing.