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Nut and Fruit Salad
One and one-half cups of white grapes cut in half and seeds removed, one cup of pineapple diced (canned fruit well drained may be used), two large apples pared and diced, a bunch of celery cut into tiny pieces, one dozen fine Brazil nuts freed from shell and inner brown covering and sliced fine (more nuts may be used if desired); mix thoroughly and pour over it two tablespoons of lemon juice. For dressing use one cup of mayonnaise and one cup of whipped cream lightly beaten together.
A Waldorf-style fruit salad from the era when a bound mayonnaise-and-cream dressing was the mark of a good table. Nothing here is difficult; the difficulties are in the vocabulary.
- "White grapes"Green table grapes. The recipe assumes seeded fruit, hence the halving and picking; modern seedless grapes can simply be halved, or left whole if small.
- A bunch of celeryGenuinely ambiguous; a "bunch" may mean the whole head, which against the four or five cups of fruit here would give a very celery-forward salad. Three or four inner ribs, finely diced, suits modern proportions; add more to taste.
- Brazil nutsThe inner brown skin is bitter and clings. Cover the shelled nuts with boiling water for a minute or two, or warm them briefly in a low oven, and the skin rubs off. Slicing them thin, as directed, matters more than it sounds — whole Brazil nuts overwhelm the fruit.
- Canned pineapple"Well drained" is the operative phrase. Packing syrup will thin the dressing and make the salad weep within the hour. Fresh pineapple works and is less sweet.
- The lemon juiceIt is there to keep the diced apple from browning as much as for flavour, so toss it through as soon as the apples are cut rather than at the end.
- The dressingOne cup mayonnaise combined with one cup cream whipped to soft peaks; "lightly beaten together" suggests a light hand, and folding rather than whisking keeps the cream from deflating. Use commercial mayonnaise unless you want to make it fresh; either is fine here, but the cream means the salad will not hold overnight.
- Assembly and yieldDress it just before serving; the fruit sheds liquid quickly under a cream dressing. The quantities suggest something on the order of six to eight portions; salads of this kind were often served on lettuce leaves.
Fruit-and-nut salads bound with a mayonnaise dressing spread widely in American community and club cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, in the wake of the Waldorf salad — apple, celery and mayonnaise — which is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s. The additions here suggest the period: canned pineapple, cheap and reliable once Hawaiian canneries scaled up, and Brazil nuts, largely a Christmas-season import that arrived in shell and had to be cracked and skinned by hand. Mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream was a common genteel treatment, sometimes called cream mayonnaise, and marked a salad as a course in its own right rather than a relish.