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Cherry Salad
Lettuce, cherries, mayonnaise dressing, cherry juice, peanuts. Arrange crisp lettuce leaves on a flat salad dish. Scatter cherries through the leaves. Pour over a mayonnaise dressing, first adding 1 tablespoonful of cherry juice instead of vinegar. Then arrange a few cherries over the top. The cherries should be stoned and a peanut placed inside to keep the shape.
A fruit-and-nut salad of the sort that filled American salad chapters between about 1890 and 1930, when sweet things dressed with mayonnaise were entirely respectable. The whole trick is in the last line: the peanut is structural, replacing the pit so the cherry does not collapse.
- Stone the cherries wholeUse a cherry pitter or a sturdy drinking straw pushed through from the stem end so the fruit stays closed around a single hole. A halved cherry will not hold a peanut and the salad loses its point.
- Which cherriesSweet dark cherries — Bing, Lambert, Lapins — are what this wants. Sour pie cherries are too soft and too acid to sit raw under mayonnaise.
- The cherry juiceA tablespoon of the juice that runs out during pitting, or juice from canned sweet cherries, replaces the vinegar in the dressing. It is much less acid than vinegar, so the dressing will taste sweet and mild rather than sharp; a few drops of lemon juice restores balance without turning it into a vinaigrette.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was beaten fresh from raw yolks and oil. Jarred mayonnaise thinned with the cherry juice behaves the same way here; if you make your own for an uncooked dressing, use pasteurized eggs.
- PeanutsUnsalted roasted peanuts, skins rubbed off, keep the colour clean. Salted ones are not wrong, but they will make the cherries weep and the dressing brackish if the salad stands.
- Lettuce"Crisp" means a firm head lettuce — iceberg, romaine hearts, or Little Gem — chilled and thoroughly dried. Wet leaves will slacken the mayonnaise into a pink puddle.
- Assemble lateDress and garnish shortly before serving. Cherry juice bleeds into both the dressing and the lettuce, and an enclosed peanut will soften if the salad stands.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Figure roughly 1 lb cherries, 1/2 cup mayonnaise and two handfuls of peanuts for six as a side salad.
Cherry Salad belongs to the era of the "fancy salad," when the salad course was as much a piece of table decoration as a dish, and mayonnaise was a common dressing for fruit as well as fish. Collections of this period are full of such constructions: stuffed dates, stuffed prunes, cherries plugged with nuts, all arranged on lettuce that was often more plinth than food. The peanut is the period detail. Cheap, more abundant following the expansion of the crop in the American South in the later nineteenth century, and increasingly sold roasted and shelled, it appears in salads of this era where an earlier cook might have reached for a blanched almond or a walnut half.