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Apple and Date Salad
Pare and core three Jonathan apples. Cut them Julienne style (in straws); there should be two cups. Sprinkle apples with lemon juice to prevent discoloration. Clean one-half pound of dates, remove skins and stones; let them dry off in the oven. When cold cut each date in strips, same as apples. Mix apples and dates and marinate them with French Dressing. Let stand one hour. Then add one-half cup almonds cut in shreds lengthwise. Mix well and serve in nests of lettuce heart leaves. Mask with Mayonnaise Dressing.
A Waldorf-family salad from the era when fruit salads were dressed twice — once with vinaigrette, once with mayonnaise. Two things need translating: what "French Dressing" meant in 1900, and how to handle the dates.
- French Dressing means vinaigretteIn American cookbooks of this period it is oil, vinegar, salt and paprika or dry mustard, whisked or shaken — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name; that would fight the dates badly.
- Drain before you maskAn hour in vinaigrette pulls a surprising amount of juice from the apples. Lift the fruit out with a fork and let it drain a moment, or the mayonnaise will slide off in a thin pool.
- Jonathan applesA tart, thin-skinned red apple still grown but not always stocked. Any crisp, sharp apple works — Braeburn, Empire or Cortland. Avoid anything mealy; julienned apple that is not firm turns to shreds in the dressing.
- Julienne sizeMatchsticks about 1/8 inch square and an inch and a half long. Two cups is roughly three medium apples once pared and cored, so the yield holds.
- Skinning the datesThe recipe skins and stones the dates first, then dries them off in the oven, so the drying is to firm the sticky flesh enough to cut into strips instead of smearing. The book gives no temperature; a low oven for a short time is the intent, and too much heat will caramelise and fuse them. Soft Medjools are difficult here — the firmer, drier Deglet Noor is probably closer to what the book assumes.
- AlmondsAlmonds split and cut lengthwise into slivers; period recipes of this kind generally assume blanched nuts. Toasting them is not in the original but does no harm; add them at the end either way so they stay crisp.
- The mayonnaiseA homemade mayonnaise as the book intends is raw egg yolk, uncooked and unheated. If serving anyone who should avoid that, use a commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little cream or lemon juice so it will spread.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly four servings as a salad course, or six if the lettuce hearts are small.
Apple, nut and mayonnaise salads spread through American cookery after the Waldorf salad appeared on New York hotel menus in the mid-1890s (the original was apple, celery and mayonnaise; nuts came later), and fruit salads served in a lettuce cup and "masked" became common — the word is a borrowing from French kitchen language, meaning coated smoothly with sauce. Dried dates, shipped from North Africa and the Persian Gulf, arrived in American grocers in autumn and were a holiday staple, sold pressed in boxes and eaten as candy as often as cooked. The double dressing — vinaigrette first to season and soften, mayonnaise after to finish — appears in the domestic-science cookbooks of the day.