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Hawaiian Salad
Arrange slices of canned Hawaiian pineapple, drained from the liquor in the can, in nests of crisp lettuce heart leaves. Pile on these Malaga grapes peeled, cut in halves lengthwise and seeds removed, mixed with an equal quantity of English walnut meats broken in pieces. Sprinkle thickly with candied cherries, cut in fine shreds or chopped. Moisten with French Dressing No. 2.
A composed salad of the kind that filled the salad course between roast and dessert in early twentieth-century menus. Nothing is cooked, so the whole recipe hinges on the fruit being dry and cold before the dressing touches it.
- Drain hardCanned pineapple carries a lot of syrup, and any that clings will thin the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the lettuce. Lay the drained slices on a towel for ten minutes and blot the tops before building the nests.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm seeded table grape shipped for the winter market, usually the pale greenish-amber white Malaga, though red Malagas were also sold. Red Globe or a seeded muscat gives the same size and crunch; if you use seedless green grapes you can skip the halving and seeding, though the texture is softer.
- Peeling grapesThe original assumes you will slip the skins, which is worth doing only with thick-skinned seeded varieties. A brief dip in boiling water and then ice water loosens them; on modern thin-skinned grapes the step is pointless.
- English walnut meatsSimply the ordinary walnut, as distinct from the black walnut then also in use. Toasting them for six to eight minutes at 350F is not in the original but keeps them from tasting flat against the sweet fruit.
- Candied cherriesGlace cherries, sold in the baking aisle. "Sprinkle thickly" is more sugar than most palates want now against pineapple and candied dressing; a scant tablespoon per serving, shredded fine, reads as garnish rather than confectionery.
- French Dressing No. 2A cross-reference to another recipe in the same book, not a bottled product. Books of this period often gave several numbered French dressings, all built on oil and vinegar with seasoning, some of them sweetened for fruit; what No. 2 actually contains has to be read on the page it points to.
- Assemble at the last minuteDress and serve immediately. Lettuce hearts collapse within minutes of being moistened, and the cut grapes weep.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number. Allow a pineapple slice per lettuce nest and count servings from the number of slices in whatever can you open.
The recipe is a small monument to the canning industry. Commercial pineapple packing in Hawaii expanded rapidly in the first years of the twentieth century, and by the 1910s canned slices were cheap and reliable enough to appear in mainland winter menus, when fresh fruit was scarce and imported Malaga grapes and glace cherries were the other available luxuries. The title follows the recipe's own wording, which calls for canned Hawaiian pineapple. The form is thoroughly of its era too: fruit, nuts and a sweetened French dressing arranged in a lettuce cup, served as a separate course before dessert, a convention that faded as American dinners contracted to fewer courses.