Why Red Fruit Salad Is Only Fruit Salad You Need This Summer

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Photo: Alex Lau

Confession: I really wanted a signature dish, the way that some people want a nickname. A dish that people would talk about and ask me to make and say, “oh Stacey makes the best [blank].” For awhile, I thought it was going to be ice cream sandwiches. And I am pretty famous for a crumb cake situation and there were once these potatoes… But in the end, my signature dish turned out to not even be cooked.

Red. Fruit. Salad.

Why red fruit salad? The answer is because the process of cutting up a ton of fruit only to watch people pick out their favorite bits and leave you with a bowl of mushy melon is seriously annoying.

Related: Life is Just a Bowl of Cherry Recipes

The origin of this mythical, once a year fruit salad is, like all great origin stories, born out of necessity. I was out of work and living with my parents in my early 20s. I was bored and poor and on my way to the hear the New York Philharmonic in Central Park. I thought sure, I will pit all these cherries my mom has laying around and put them in the fruit salad. Then I realized my friend Rebecca doesn’t like anything but plums. And, let’s be honest, we all like the red grapes the best, anyway. You see where this is going. The salad was all red and it was a hit.

Red fruit salad has evolved slightly over time. One, I shop for it now, so depending on what’s in the market, it can have sugar plums, plums, watermelon, strawberries (yes, it can have strawberries, the whole thing will get eaten and they won’t go bad), red grapes, and anything else interesting in the hue of deep pink to reddish purple. I have found there are two rules. One, the cherries must be pitted with a knife because the cherry juice is what makes this so awesome (trim your nails!) and two, no raspberries. They literally ruin everything. Maybe even in life.

There you have it. The greatest fruit salad recipe of all time.

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