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Fruit Salad
Mix equal parts shredded fresh or preserved pineapple, bananas in small pieces, and sections tangerines, and marinate together in French dressing. Fill banana skins with mixture, sprinkle generously with paprika, arrange on lettuce leaves, and serve with French dressing.
The dressing is made as follows: Put 4 tablespoons melted Crisco in cold bowl; if possible, put in small piece ice. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt, saltspoon pepper, and stir until salt is dissolved, add tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. Beat for 3 minutes until dressing is as thick as good cream. Use at once.
A fruit salad served in banana skins, dressed with a shortening-based vinaigrette that only makes sense once you know it was written to sell Crisco. A few of the instructions need translating before this works on a modern counter.
- The dressing is the problemMelted Crisco chilled over ice will set back into a solid, waxy emulsion that congeals on cold fruit and coats the palate. Any neutral salad oil in the same quantity gives the intended result — four tablespoons oil to one tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice, whisked to a thick cream.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon was a real object in a period cruet set, and its measure is usually reckoned at roughly a quarter teaspoon (some sources give less). Read it as a generous pinch of pepper.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as an all-purpose fat and, in books like this one, pushed into places butter and oil belonged. It is still sold but has been reformulated away from the original hydrogenated cottonseed product.
- Banana skins as cupsHalve the bananas lengthwise through the peel, lift the flesh out in one piece, and cut it up for the salad. The empty half-skins hold the mixture. They brown quickly, so fill them within a few minutes of serving.
- Preserved pineappleMost likely pineapple put up in syrup, i.e. canned; it could also mean candied or sugar-preserved fruit. Either way, drain it well and pat dry, or the syrup will thin the dressing on the plate.
- Marinating timeNo time is given. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough; longer and the bananas soften to mush and the tangerine sections break apart.
- PaprikaUsed here for colour rather than heat; the paprika commonly sold at the time was generally mild. 'Generously' is fair advice with sweet paprika, but use a light hand with anything labelled hot or smoked.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two bananas will give four half-skins, which with equal parts of the three fruits would serve about four as a salad course.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, and its purpose is visible in every recipe: Crisco appears where a cook of the period would otherwise reach for butter, lard, or olive oil, including — as here — in a salad dressing, where it never belonged. The salad itself is pure early twentieth-century American hostess cookery, in which fruit, dressing, lettuce leaves and a dusting of paprika were assembled into something meant to look composed on the plate; serving the mixture in the hollowed banana skin is the same impulse that produced grapefruit baskets and tomato cases. Tangerines and canned pineapple both mark the period too, when refrigerated rail transport and commercial canning had put out-of-season fruit within reach of an ordinary household menu.