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Pear and Pimiento Salad
Fill each canned pimiento with 2 halves canned pears; place each pimiento in nest of lettuce and serve with following dressing: Put 1 teaspoon salt and 1 saltspoon black pepper in bowl, and stir into them with wooden spoon, very slowly, 4 tablespoons melted Crisco, and add 2 tablespoons vinegar, mixing it well with Crisco.
A three-ingredient composed salad from a Crisco promotional cookbook, with a dressing whose behaviour needs rethinking before you serve it.
- The melted-shortening problemCrisco is solid at room temperature, so this dressing sets to a waxy film the moment it touches cold pears and lettuce. Use a neutral oil, or olive oil, at the same quantity: 4 tablespoons oil to 2 tablespoons vinegar gives a 2:1 dressing, sharper than the more usual 3:1.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A full teaspoon of salt for six tablespoons of dressing is on the aggressive side by modern taste; start with half and adjust.
- Canned pimientosThese are whole roasted red peppers, peeled and packed in brine, sold in jars rather than cans now. Drain and pat them dry or the dressing will slide off. Whole jarred piquillo peppers work well and hold their shape better.
- Canned pearsTwo halves per pepper assumes small halves in heavy syrup. Drain them thoroughly and blot; the syrup will otherwise sweeten the dressing into nothing. Halves packed in juice give a cleaner result.
- Order of mixingSalt goes into the vinegar, not the fat, if you want it to dissolve. The original stirs it into the oil first, which leaves gritty salt in the finished dressing.
- YieldThe dressing makes about 6 tablespoons. Assemble at the last minute; the peppers weep and the lettuce collapses on standing.
This comes from a genre that barely exists any more: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, hydrogenated vegetable shortening, reached the American market in 1911, and Procter & Gamble commissioned recipe collections to establish it as a substitute for butter and lard in a wide range of applications, including places where a solid fat makes little sense, as here. The salad itself belongs to the early twentieth-century American fashion for arranging canned goods prettily on lettuce, when tinned pimientos and pears were still modern conveniences and colour contrast on the plate was admired.