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Sliced Apple Salad
Take large red apples, core them but do not peel, cut into slices a third of an inch thick. Mix one half cup of peanut butter and one cup of cottage cheese with a quarter cup of French dressing. Put this mixture in a pastry bag with a rose tube attached, force the mixture out onto the slices of apple. Arrange on lettuce leaves and serve.
A cold plated salad from the era when the pastry bag was standard equipment for savoury work as well as sweet. Two things decide whether it works: the apple slices staying pale, and the filling being stiff enough to hold a piped shape.
- Stop the browning firstCut apples darken within minutes, and the recipe gives no protection. Dip the slices in water acidulated with lemon juice, drain them on a towel, and pipe just before serving. Rings cut across a cored apple, rather than lengthwise wedges, give the flat rounds the method assumes.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn American cookery of this period, French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and sometimes paprika, shaken to a temporary emulsion. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name now, which would make the filling cloying.
- Get the filling stiff enough to pipeOrdinary curd cottage cheese carries too much whey to hold a rose. Drain it in a sieve, then push it through the sieve or blitz it smooth with the peanut butter before adding the dressing a spoonful at a time. Stop while it still holds a peak; if it slumps, more drained cheese will bring it back.
- Peanut butter of the periodThe natural, unstabilised kind may be nearer what is intended, but it separates and can turn the mixture oily. Stir it thoroughly first, or use a modern smooth stabilised butter and expect a slightly firmer result.
- The rose tubeA rose or petal tube is the flat-slotted one; a small star tube gives a similar effect with less fuss and clogs less on cottage cheese. Whatever tube you use, the mixture must be free of curd lumps or it will jam.
- Yield and servingThe quantities given make something under two cups of filling, so the number of slices dressed will depend on how heavily each is piped; treat any portion count as a guess. Assemble on chilled plates and serve immediately; the filling weeps if it stands.
Salads like this belong to the American "fancy salad" tradition that flourished between the wars, when the salad course moved from a bowl of leaves to an arranged plate built for the eye as much as the palate. Peanut butter, cheap and widely available after commercial grinding and stabilising took hold in the early twentieth century, was pressed into service as a savoury binder in ways that now read oddly: stuffed into celery, spread on dates, folded into cheese. Cottage cheese carried the same virtue of thrift, and its pairing with fruit appears often in reducing diets and light-lunch cookery of the 1920s and 1930s. The instruction to reach for a pastry bag and a rose tube is the period's real signature, though how many home cooks actually owned decorating tubes is not something this recipe can tell us.