June Salad
Remove stones from red and pink Ox-heart cherries and cut them in halves lengthwise. Remove the pulp from oranges and cut in inch cubes; peel bananas and cut in one-half inch cubes. Use equal quantities of each and marinate with French Dressing No. 2. Serve in nests of heart lettuce leaves and mask with Mayonnaise. FRENCH DRESSING No. 2 1/4 teaspoon salt. 4 tablespoons Olive oil. 1/8 teaspoon paprika. 2 tablespoons lemon juice.
PROCESS: Put seasoning in small bowl, add oil slowly, stirring constantly; add lemon juice slowly, continue beating until all is used. Chill, beat again and turn over fruit.
A fruit salad from the era when sweet things dressed in mayonnaise were considered a proper salad course. The mechanics are simple; the only real risks are browned bananas and a dressing that swamps the fruit.
- Ox-heart cherriesAn old heart-shaped sweet variety, pale-to-deep red, rarely sold by name now. Bing gives the dark half and Rainier or Royal Ann the pink; either way choose cherries firm enough to hold a lengthwise half.
- "Remove the pulp from oranges"Most likely supreming: cut away peel and white pith, then free the segments from their membranes before cubing. The membrane is what can make an old-fashioned orange salad stringy.
- Assemble at the last minuteCut bananas brown quickly once exposed to air. Cut them last, toss them straight into the lemon-based dressing, and plate immediately rather than chilling the finished salad.
- Dressing yieldFrench Dressing No. 2 makes about 6 tablespoons, a 2:1 oil-to-lemon ratio that is sharper than most modern vinaigrettes. It is meant to season, not to pool.
- The dressing will not stay emulsifiedWith no mustard or egg it separates on standing, which is why the recipe tells you to chill it and beat it again before use. Whisk hard just before pouring.
- PaprikaHere it is for color and a faint sweetness, not heat. Use sweet Hungarian or Spanish paprika; smoked paprika is wrong for fruit.
- "Mask with Mayonnaise"Masking meant covering the top with a spoonful of thick mayonnaise. Modern jarred mayonnaise is too assertive against cherries and orange; thinning it with a little whipped cream or plain yogurt, or reducing it to a small dollop, keeps the fruit legible.
- ServingUse a cupped inner leaf of romaine or Little Gem, which stands in for the "heart lettuce" of the period.
Fruit salads bound or crowned with mayonnaise were a fixture of American middle-class entertaining from the 1890s through the 1930s, when the salad course was still a new social ambition and the arrival of commercially shipped citrus and Central American bananas made out-of-season fruit a mark of a well-stocked table. 52 Sunday Dinners is organized month by month, and this dish sits in June because that is when cherries come in over much of the country while oranges were still readily available; the pairing of local seasonal fruit with imported staples is exactly the compromise the era's menu planners worked with. The numbered dressings — French Dressing No. 1, No. 2, and so on — reflect the period's cooking-school habit of teaching a small set of base preparations to be cross-referenced throughout a book. Ox-heart cherries, named for the heart shape, were a familiar market variety of the day and have since been largely displaced by Bing and its descendants.