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Apple-and-Nut Salad
Wash very thoroughly through several very cold waters as much well-bleached lettuce as is needed. Chop or grind peanuts, pecans, or English walnuts enough to make 1 cupful. All these three nuts may be used, or only one, but at least one other is better than the peanut alone. Have 6 apples in the refrigerator or a cool place, to avoid having to chill them too long after paring, as they discolor soon and lose their fresh look.
Dry the lettuce on a napkin and arrange it in nests on the salad platter, using only the pale, crisp leaves. Shortly before time to serve, pare and core the apples, which should be of medium and uniform size, slice them in rings, being careful to keep the rings whole. Pile several of these slices in the nests of lettuce, and fill the cavity in the centres with the slightly salted chopped nuts. On top of each pile a spoonful of very stiff mayonnaise or a boiled dressing that is stiff enough to hold up. A little more salad dressing may be put around the base of the apples, or a pretty dish of it passed with the salad.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the whole thing stands or falls on apple rings that stay pale and intact. Everything but the apples can be ready an hour ahead.
- Keep the rings wholeCore the apples with an apple corer while whole, then slice crosswise about 1/4 inch thick so each slice is a complete ring. A firm variety such as Braeburn, Honeycrisp or Granny Smith holds its shape; softer apples tear at the core hole.
- DiscolorationThe recipe's only defence against browning is speed and cold. A brief dip in water acidulated with lemon juice, then a pat dry, buys you half an hour without changing the flavour much.
- "Well-bleached lettuce"This means heads grown or tied so the inner leaves stay pale and crisp, not anything done in the kitchen. Iceberg hearts or the pale inner leaves of romaine or butterhead give the same effect.
- Drying the leavesA napkin works, but a salad spinner is faster and leaves the leaves drier, which matters because stiff mayonnaise slides off wet lettuce.
- The nutsChop by hand or pulse briefly; grinding to a paste, as the word "grind" might suggest, gives an oily filling. Toasting pecans or walnuts for a few minutes at 350F sharpens the flavour considerably.
- Stiff dressing"Stiff enough to hold up" is the operative phrase. A commercial mayonnaise is usually thick enough as-is; a boiled (cooked) dressing must be fully chilled before it will sit on top of the apples instead of running down.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Six apples and a cup of nuts, with several rings piled in each nest, would suggest roughly six individual servings as a first course or a lunch salad.
Fruit-and-mayonnaise salads were a fixture of American entertaining from the 1890s through the 1930s, and this one is a plated cousin of the Waldorf salad, generally traced to Oscar Tschirky of New York's Waldorf Hotel in the mid-1890s, which combined apple, celery and mayonnaise, with walnuts added in later versions. What distinguishes this recipe is presentation: the lettuce "nests," the uniform rings, the filled centres, all of which reflect a period in which a salad was expected to be built and looked at rather than tossed. The permission to use peanuts, with a note that they are better mixed with something else, is a quiet marker of household economy in an era when pecans and English walnuts cost noticeably more.