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Pineapple Salad
Take a large pineapple, cut off the top, hollow out the fruit saving all but the core. Mix this with an equal part of apple and seeded white grapes. Mix with mayonnaise and put the fruit into the pineapple, put back the top with its tuft of leaves, and serve. The pineapple may also be cut with a slice taken from the side and the leaves left on the top. The fruit taken out in the same way as when the top is cut off.
A hollowed-pineapple fruit salad that stands or falls on the shell being cut cleanly and the filling being cold. Nothing here is technically difficult, but a few period assumptions need translating.
- Choose the pineapple for the shellPick one that is squat, heavy, and sits flat, with a fresh green crown — the leaves are half the presentation. A fruit that leans will need a thin slice off the base to stand, which risks leaking juice onto the platter.
- Hollowing it outCut around the inside about half an inch from the rind with a thin, flexible knife, then work the flesh out in wedges and cut them free at the base. A grapefruit knife makes short work of the corners. Drain the shell upside down for a few minutes before filling.
- "Saving all but the core"The fibrous central column is genuinely too woody to eat raw. Cut it away and keep it for juicing or for steeping in a pitcher of iced tea rather than discarding it outright.
- White grapesIn this period "white" grapes usually means green ones, and seeded table grapes were the ordinary sort, though seedless varieties were already available. Modern seedless green grapes need only halving; leave them whole and they roll out of the spoon.
- Keeping the apple paleDice the apple last and toss it immediately in some of the pineapple juice that collected while you worked, or it will begin to brown before the salad reaches the table.
- Mayonnaise on fruitThis is authentic to the era, and period mayonnaise was generally stiffer than the commercial product. If it reads as heavy, thin it with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice, or use a boiled dressing, which also appears with fruit salads of the period.
- Serve it coldFill the shell no more than an hour ahead and chill it, crown replaced. Cut fruit dressed with mayonnaise weeps and slackens if it stands for several hours.
- YieldA large pineapple filled with equal parts apple and grapes serves about four as a first course or a light lunch, or six if it is one dish among several.
Cook and Be Cool belongs to a genre of hot-weather cookery books aimed at kitchens without air conditioning: cold plates, minimal cooking, and food that could be assembled early and set in the icebox. Fruit-and-mayonnaise salads were a fixture of the period, and the Waldorf salad — apple, celery and mayonnaise, from the New York hotel of that name in the 1890s — is the best-known of the type, endlessly varied thereafter with grapes, nuts and canned or fresh pineapple. Serving the salad in its own hollowed shell with the crown replaced reflects the era's taste for food presented in its container, the same impulse behind stuffed tomatoes, orange baskets and melon bowls.