Pear Salad
Take a can of Bartlett pears. Drain the fruit from the juice. Fill the centers with chopped celery mixed with mayonnaise and sprinkled with chopped salted almonds. Arrange on lettuce leaves and serve.
A canned-fruit salad of the sort that carried American luncheon menus for half a century. It needs almost no adjustment, but a few details decide whether it reads as elegant or as a relic.
- QuantitiesCans of pear halves vary; a smaller can may hold four or five halves, a larger one eight or more, so plan on two halves per serving and scale from there. Roughly a cup of finely chopped celery and 1/3 cup mayonnaise will fill six to eight halves.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the dish. Pears out of syrup are wet and slick; drain them cut-side down on paper towels for ten minutes or the mayonnaise slides off and the lettuce collapses into a puddle.
- Pears in heavy syrupMid-century cans were packed in sugar syrup, which is why the salad tastes like dessert. Pears canned in juice or light syrup give a better balance against the salted almonds.
- Salted almondsCookbooks of the period commonly gave salted almonds as blanched nuts fried in butter or oil and salted while hot, though tinned salted almonds were also sold. Toasting raw almonds and salting them while warm gets close to that flavour.
- Celery cutChop fine, roughly 1/4 inch. Larger pieces will not sit in the hollow of a pear half and the salad falls apart on the fork.
- MayonnaiseIf you want the salad to read sweeter, in the manner of period fruit salads, stir a spoonful of the drained pear syrup into a modern mayonnaise.
- LettuceThe recipe says only 'lettuce leaves,' used here as a base rather than as something eaten. A cup-shaped leaf, iceberg or butterhead, holds the pear steadiest.
- Assemble lateFill no more than half an hour before serving and keep chilled. Celery weeps salt-drawn liquid into mayonnaise fairly quickly.
Salads built on canned fruit, mayonnaise and a nut garnish belong to the American luncheon tradition that ran from the 1910s through the 1950s, and they were sold on convenience as much as taste: everything came out of a can or a jar, nothing needed cooking, and the plate could be composed in advance. Bartlett pears, the English Williams pear renamed for the Massachusetts merchant Enoch Bartlett who propagated it in the early nineteenth century, were the dominant canning pear on the West Coast and a common presence in fruit-salad recipes of the period. A book with a title like Cook and Be Cool is squarely in the hot-weather-menu genre, where the point is to keep the stove off entirely, and this salad is the kind of cold course that requires no heat at all.