Cleo Mayfield
FRUIT SALAD
SALAD
DRESSING
1½ grapefruit 1 orange 1 apple 1 cup celery 1 banana, cut in small pieces 2 eggs 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon dry mustard Piece butter, size of egg Put in double boiler and beat with egg-beater till thick and smooth. When cold add cup of whipped cream.
Mix with fruit.
This recipe is for four persons, but the dressing is sufficient for three times this amount. It will keep in the ice box.
Cleo Mayfield.
Billion.ust
INDIAN
PUDDING
1 qt. milk ½ cup cornmeal ½ cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon ginger or cinnamon 1 cup cold milk Heat one quart of milk and stir in the meal slowly until it thickens..
Take from the stove and add molasses, salt and spice. Put mixture into a buttered earthen pudding dish and add cold milk. Bake over a low flame for two hours. After the pudding is partly cooked a little more cold milk may be added if desired. Serve with or without cream. Yours truly,
WM. S. HART
Campbell SWEET CHESTNUT PURÉE 1 pound chestnuts 1 cupful milk ½ cupful sugar 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla Blanch the chestnuts, then cook until tender in boiling water. Drain and rub the chestnuts through a sieve, combine with the milk, butter, and sugar, and cook until thick. Cool, flavor, and just before serving rub again through a colander to give lightness; serve with sweetened whipped cream flavored with vanilla.
Three separate dishes were printed together on this page, with the contributors' names and show titles run in as they were set in the original. The fruit salad dressing is a cooked boiled dressing lightened with cream, not a mayonnaise, and it is the item most likely to trip up a modern cook.
- The fractions are unreliableThe printing gives "1½ cup cornmeal" and "1½ cup molasses" for the Indian pudding. For the pudding these are very likely ½ in the original setting; a quart of milk cannot carry a cup and a half of meal plus a cup and a half of molasses. Treat those two as half-cup measures and adjust by feel. The chestnut purée's "1½ cupful sugar" may be a similar mis-setting, but a pound of nuts will take that much sugar in a sweet purée, so taste as you go.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure: about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It appears in the salad dressing, where it enriches the cooked egg base.
- The dressing must not scrambleEggs, vinegar, sugar, mustard, salt and butter beaten over simmering water is a custard. Keep the water below a boil and beat continuously until it coats a spoon, then pull it off the heat. The whipped cream goes in only when the base is completely cold, or it will deflate.
- Dress it lateGrapefruit, orange, apple, celery and banana give off a great deal of liquid. Combine the fruit and fold in the dressing shortly before serving, or the salad waters down. The recipe correctly notes it makes roughly three times the dressing needed for four servings.
- "Bake over a low flame"Read as low oven heat rather than a burner. The recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven is what is wanted, and two hours suits a baked cornmeal pudding. The cold milk added before baking is traditionally what gives the pudding its soft, creamy top layer.
- Cornmeal, not "Indian meal"Older books use the terms interchangeably. Use plain yellow or white cornmeal, medium grind; stone-ground gives a better texture than fine degerminated meal. Whisk it into the hot milk in a slow stream or it will lump.
- Blanching chestnutsScore each nut, boil briefly, then peel off both the shell and the inner brown skin while still hot. Cooked, sieved chestnut needs no thickener, so watch the purée as it reduces with milk, sugar and butter, and stir often to keep the bottom from catching.
- YieldThe salad serves four, as the recipe states. The pudding's quart of milk plus the extra cup needs a dish of roughly a quart and a half; the chestnut purée, from a pound of nuts, makes a small dessert for several.
This page appears to come from one of the celebrity charity cookbooks of the period, in which stage and screen performers sent in a favorite dish over a signature — hence the abrupt run of names and garbled show titles between recipes. Cleo Mayfield was a musical comedy actress of the period, and the fruit salad with a cooked, cream-lightened dressing is very much of its moment: grapefruit, banana and diced celery bound in sweet-sour boiled dressing was a fashionable luncheon salad. Directly beneath it sits an Indian pudding signed by William S. Hart, the silent Western star, which is a much older thing entirely — a New England dish usually traced to English hasty pudding, made with the cornmeal (long called "Indian meal") that stood in for scarce wheat flour, sweetened with molasses from the West Indies trade, and baked slowly in a brick oven. The sweet chestnut purée at the foot of the page belongs to the European end of the same table, a dish generally traced to French and Italian cookery, where sieved chestnut with sugar and cream long served as a winter dessert in place of fruit.