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Alligator Pear Salad
Chill the pears, cut in half, take out the seed, arrange on lettuce leaves and fill the centers of pears with French dressing.
A four-line recipe that depends almost entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and the sharpness of the dressing. Nothing here needs modernising except the assumptions the author left unstated.
- Ripeness is the hingeThe recipe assumes a pear ready to eat, since a half that will not yield to a spoon is useless in a salad. Judge by a slight give under thumb pressure at the stem end; a rock-hard avocado needs two to four days at room temperature before it goes anywhere near the refrigerator.
- ChillingChill only after the fruit is fully ripe. Cold sharply slows ripening, and an underripe avocado held in the refrigerator is liable to chilling injury, turning leathery and grey-brown rather than soft.
- BrowningCut surfaces oxidise within minutes. Halve the fruit at the last moment, or brush the flesh with lemon or lime juice; an acid-forward dressing spooned straight into the cavity does the same job.
- French dressing, 1930s senseNot a sweet bottled orange dressing but a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, shaken until cloudy. Some period versions add a little paprika or a spot of onion juice.
- Variety mattersHass, now the default, has thick pebbled skin and dense flesh that holds a half neatly, but it was not a commercial factor until well after this period. The smooth green-skinned Fuerte type standard in the 1930s is generally described as milder and less oily, which is worth knowing if the dish tastes richer than you expected.
- Seat the halvesA rounded half rolls and dumps its dressing. Set each one in a nest of shredded lettuce, or trim a thin slice from the base of the shell to give it a flat seat.
- YieldOne half per person as a first course within a larger menu; two halves make a light lunch. Serve with a teaspoon and let the eater scoop from the shell, which is what filling the cavity with dressing implies.
The name recorded here is the older one in English: alligator pear, often said to come from a sailors' mangling of the Spanish aguacate, itself from Nahuatl ahuacatl, though it is more usually treated as a folk-etymological reshaping of avocado/avogato, reinforced by the fruit's pebbled hide and pear shape. Avocados were still a minor luxury crop in the United States when this book appeared, grown chiefly in southern California and Florida and priced accordingly, which is why the fruit shows up as a single dressed half in a composed menu rather than mashed by the bowlful. The California industry's push to standardise on "avocado" through the 1920s and 1930s was a marketing decision as much as a linguistic one, and the editor's note above catches the older word at the point where it was beginning to lose. That a printed recipe still needed to explain nothing about how to eat the thing, only how to chill and halve it, suggests the fruit was familiar to the book's readers even if it was not cheap.