Side Dish: Madagascar Fruit Salad

While planning our final meals for this year's Recipes and Context interim, we decided to add side dishes to the meals to round them out a bit.  We decided that a fruit salad would be nice for our second meal.  Thinking of some of my favorite fruit salad recipes, I decided to volunteer a recipe for Madagascar fruit salad.  I first made this sweet, syrupy fruit salad in sixth grade when a friend and I had to represent Madagascar in a culture fair.  Liz and I were searching for some type of food we could make to impress the judges of the fair when we came upon this recipe for Salady Voankazo online at www.africa.upenn.com.  The signature ingredient for this dish is vanilla, something I didn't often associate with fresh fruit.

Here is the approximate recipe from http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Cookbook/Madagascar.html#SALADYVOANKAZO:

Salady Voankazo

Fruit:
1 cup fresh pinapple, chopped
1 cup cantaloupe, chopped
1 cup oranges, peeled and thinly sliced
1/2 cup strawberries, stemmed and sliced

Syrup:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
vanilla extract for finishing fuit salad

1. Combine fruit in heat-resistant bowl.
2. In a small saucepan, combine sugar, water, salt, and lemon juice. 
3. Bring sugar mixture to a boil and boil hard for 1 minute.
4. Remove syrup from heat and add 2 tablespoons vanilla.
5. Pour hot syrup over fruit.
6. Chill fruit salad in a refridgerator for at least 1 hour before serving.
7. When ready to serve, pour a little vanilla extract over fruit salad.

Yield: about one quart, or 8 servings

Enjoy!