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Apple Cup Salad
Take as many pretty medium-sized red apples as you have people to serve. Cut a round piece out of the stem end, take out the core, hollow out the apples, and use enough of the pulp mixed with minced chicken, celery and mayonnaise to fill the apple cups. After the apples are filled, sprinkle the top with chopped peanuts. Garnish platter with shredded lettuce hearts.
A cold luncheon salad built inside a hollowed apple, of the kind that filled American ladies' menus between the wars. It needs almost no cooking, but it does need attention to the apple.
- Apple choiceThe recipe wants a firm red apple that holds its shape and does not collapse when scooped. Gala, Braeburn or Jonagold work; avoid Red Delicious, which is mealy, and Granny Smith, which fights the mayonnaise.
- HollowingCut the lid off the stem end, then work with a melon baller or grapefruit spoon, leaving a wall about 1/2 inch thick. Any thinner and the cup slumps as it stands.
- Browning is the hingeCut apple oxidises within minutes, and this dish is served raw and cold. Brush the cut interior and rims with lemon juice, and toss the diced pulp in lemon juice too, the moment it comes out.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Per apple, figure roughly 1/4 cup diced cooked chicken, 2 tablespoons diced celery, the reserved apple pulp diced, and 1 to 2 tablespoons mayonnaise — enough to bind, not to drown.
- Minced chickenIn American usage of this period 'minced' means finely diced or chopped cooked chicken, not ground raw meat. Poached breast or leftover roast, cooled completely, is what is intended.
- Chopped peanutsSalted peanuts, coarsely chopped, suit the dish better than raw ones. Add them at the last moment or they soften.
- Lettuce heartsShredded iceberg or the pale inner leaves of romaine. Shred it just before serving; it wilts and weeps quickly once cut.
- Yield and holdingOne apple per person, as stated. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep refrigerated, uncovered cut fruit being both a browning and a drying problem.
Stuffed-apple and stuffed-tomato salads were a fixture of American luncheon menus from roughly the 1910s through the 1950s, the era when a "salad" often meant something molded, hollowed or otherwise architectural rather than a bowl of leaves. The filling here is close to a Waldorf salad — apple, celery, mayonnaise, nuts — with chicken added to make it a main course, and served in the fruit it came from. Dishes of this kind could be made in the morning, held on ice, and set out without further work, which suits a title like Cook and Be Cool: composed cold food for a hostess who did not want to stand over a stove in summer. Peanuts here stand in for the walnuts more usually associated with Waldorf salad.