M.F.K. Fisher: Ambrosia

M.F.K. Fisher's The Art of Eating is a joy to read. It's a compilation of her most famous gastronomical works however, it's not about food or eating. It's about the role food plays in comfort, people coming together and discovering life, different cultures, and their inner desires.

Her An Alphabet for Gourmets inspired this blog so it's fitting that I do the ABCs of recipes in The Art of Eating. Starting with A for Ambrosia. My memories of ambrosia are of canned fruit cocktail topped with marshmallows. To be honest, I'm not sure where that memory comes from--is it a lunchroom memory or a church memory? Something my mother served? Who knows. I just know that one day, when I was in my 20s, as I ate rocky road ice cream I had a revelation: I hated marshmallows. I don't know how this distaste developed or when. It also pertains only to cold marshmallows as I will top hot chocolate with them and finish off the marshmallow layer of sweet potato casserole (which is rare in my family--for some reason we don't eat sweet potatoes at holiday meals and this saddens me since I love them).

So Fisher's recipe for ambrosia appealed to me because it did not contain marshmallows.

Her recipe is basically layered oranges, coconut, and sugar with sherry* poured on top, chilled. Easy enough. I took my 4 month old to the liquor store to get sherry in the dessert wine aisle. Next to the sherry bottles was a bottle of dessert wine that I already had in my tiny wine collection and I decided to use that bottle instead of purchasing a bottle of sherry that would be used once and never again. When I got home, I realized I had already drunk that bottle of dessert wine (when? when did I do that?) and I did not want to sacrifice my bottle of Sauternes.

Google lead me to some ambrosia recipes which used rum. I don't have rum either. What I do have is a bottle of Southern Comfort from when I made a Southern Comfort apple pie 5 years ago. So I used that. Not the same, I know, but I like to think it fits with the southern heritage of the dish. According to Fisher, "In this country Ambrosia is a dessert as traditionally and irrefutably Southern as pecan pie." Interestingly, Serious Eats just ran a recipe of Ambrosia from The Lee Bro. Simple, Fresh, Southern, which is alcohol-free. Fisher's recipe seems to be a California version of Ambrosia.


The verdict: Nice. More of a topping. If I were to do it again, I would use sherry and more sugar, which I used a lighter hand with than the recipe called for, and bigger, better oranges. So my ambrosia was not exactly the food of the gods. Worth making again as a topping. And that's how we're planning on eating it tonight: over ice cream (not rocky road).


* When I spent a summer in France, the French people I met would often question my name (who names their child "Dear"?). I ended up telling them that I was named after the aperitif. I've only had my namesake drink a few times, last time over gelato.