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Prune and Nut Salad
Buy very select prunes for this purpose (tins holding one or two pounds are best), cook prunes in the usual way, letting the liquor evaporate during the latter part of cooking. Prunes should not be as well done as when serving them as sauce. Drain prunes from the liquor and chill them. Remove the stones carefully, cut prunes in five pieces lengthwise. Cut pecan nut meats in four pieces lengthwise. Mix prunes and nut meats, sprinkle with salt and paprika. For one-half pound prunes and one-fourth pound shelled nut meats allow one cup whipping cream. Whip cream until solid, season with one-half teaspoon each salt and paprika; add two tablespoons lemon juice and one and one-half tablespoons Sherry wine slowly, while beating constantly. Mix two-thirds of the cream with the prunes and nuts. Arrange the heart leaves of lettuce on cold, individual salad plates, pile some of the mixture in each and mask with remaining whipped cream. Arrange three pieces of prunes on top of each portion, radiating from center, and place a cherry or strawberry on top of each.
A fruit-and-nut salad in the early twentieth-century manner, dressed with a sweet-sour whipped cream rather than an oil vinaigrette. Most of the work is in getting the prunes to the right texture and the cream to hold.
- "Select" prunesRead this as a call for the best large fruit; period prune trade terms covered both quality and size (size usually given as a count per pound), and it is not clear which is meant here. Look for large or jumbo dried prunes; pitted ones save the fiddly stoning, though whole fruit holds its shape better.
- Tins of one or two poundsDried prunes were sold in tins as well as boxes at the time. Any modern package works; the instruction is about buying enough of one uniform size, not about the container.
- "Cook in the usual way"Soak the prunes in water to cover for an hour or two, then simmer gently until just tender, uncovering near the end so the liquid cooks down to a syrup. Stop well short of the soft, collapsing stage you would want for a stewed sauce; these must stay firm enough to slice.
- Chill before cuttingWarm prunes tear. Drain and refrigerate them thoroughly, then stone and slice. The syrup left behind is worth keeping for another use.
- The seasoning is assertiveHalf a teaspoon each of salt and paprika in one cup of cream reads as a lot by current habits, and it is meant to: the cream is functioning as a savoury dressing. Season lightly, taste, and build up rather than adding it all at once.
- Adding acid to whipped creamWhip to stiff peaks first, then trickle in the lemon juice and sherry with the beater running. Added quickly, or into under-whipped cream, the acid can thin or curdle the mixture. Use a full-fat heavy or whipping cream; low-fat creams will not hold, and ultra-pasteurised cream whips less readily.
- Assemble at the last minuteA dressed cream salad will begin to weep before long. Have the prunes, nuts and lettuce cold and ready, whip the cream just before serving, and plate immediately.
- YieldHalf a pound of prunes, a quarter pound of pecans and a cup of cream will fill four to six individual plates as a salad course.
Salads dressed with whipped cream rather than oil were a fixture of American entertaining from roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, and fruit-and-nut combinations on a lettuce leaf were the polite middle ground between a savoury first course and a dessert. Prunes did well in this role: they kept indefinitely in the pantry, arrived by rail from California in graded sizes, and were cheap enough to be everyday while looking deliberate when cut and fanned on a plate. The sherry and paprika are period markers too, the one signalling a company dish and the other the bright red dusting that cookbooks of the era reached for whenever a pale plate needed colour.