Pear Salad
Wipe, pare and remove the cores from the desired number of ripe (early) pears. Cut in eighths lengthwise. Arrange on beds of crisp cress, or lettuce heart leaves. Bestrew with prepared red peppers cut in very fine rings. Serve with French Dressing, using lemon juice in place of vinegar. Canned red peppers may be used when fresh peppers are not available. To prepare peppers, plunge them into boiling water for a moment, cut a slice from stem ends, remove seeds and veins, cover with cold water until crisp; drain dry, and cut in fine shreds.
A three-ingredient composed salad that lives or dies on the ripeness of the pear. Everything else is assembly.
- French Dressing means vinaigretteAt this date it is oil, acid, salt and pepper whisked or shaken together — commonly around three parts oil to one of acid, though the recipe itself gives no proportions — not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name. Make it thin and sharp; the pear supplies all the sweetness.
- Pick the pear"Early" pears means the summer varieties — Clapp's Favorite, Bartlett and the like. Use fruit that yields at the neck under a thumb; a hard pear cut in eighths is unpleasant and a mealy one collapses on the plate.
- Cut last, and acidulatePared pear browns within minutes. Cut it just before serving, or turn the wedges in a little of the lemon juice reserved from the dressing.
- The peppers are sweet, not hot"Prepared red peppers" here are most likely ripe sweet peppers of the pimiento type. The recipe does not peel them; the brief scald and then the cold-water soak are what make the shreds crisp rather than limp, so do not skip the soak.
- Canned red peppersThe modern equivalent is a jar of whole pimientos or roasted red peppers. Rinse and pat them very dry — the packing liquid will thin the dressing and streak the plate.
- Cress and lettuce heartsWatercress or garden cress, or the pale inner leaves of butterhead or romaine. Dry the greens thoroughly; wet leaves refuse to hold vinaigrette.
- YieldThe recipe leaves the number of pears to the cook; a medium pear cut in eighths will serve one or two. Dress the greens lightly, arrange the fruit on top, and spoon the rest of the dressing over at the table so the pear does not sit and weep.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the American fruit-salad boom of the early twentieth century, a shift often linked to refrigerated rail shipping and to the spread of commercial mayonnaise and bottled dressings, though commercial mayonnaise was only just emerging around this date and the causal story is more asserted than demonstrated. Menu-planning books of the period slotted a light salad between the roast and the sweet, and August offered the first soft summer pears alongside ripe sweet peppers, used as much for the red-on-white-on-green look as for the taste, since color contrast is generally said to have been prized in the era's salad writing. The pepper treatment is worth noting on its own: pimientos are traditionally said to have reached the American South from Spain not long before, and the date of their introduction and that of the rise of commercial canning are separate and imprecisely fixed; they were still novel enough that a cookbook had to explain how to peel and shred them, while a canned substitute was already assumed to be in the pantry.