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A New Salad
Shred some cabbage, choosing a sweet, white one, suitable for slaw or salad; blend with plenty of Dromedary Cocoanut, and some blanched-and-shredded almonds.
Make a mayonnaise; add plenty of whipped cream, and decorate with dashes of paprika. Slivered green sweet peppers may be used for decoration and to eat with the salad, if liked.
A promotional recipe with no quantities at all, so the work is in setting a workable ratio and translating one branded ingredient. The hinge is the dressing: mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream breaks down quickly on shredded cabbage, so it goes on at the last minute.
- Dromedary CocoanutA packaged desiccated shredded coconut sold by Hills Brothers alongside their dates. Unsweetened desiccated or fine-shred dried coconut is the closest match; sweetened flaked coconut from a supermarket will make the salad cloying.
- A working ratioFor a small head of cabbage (about 1 1/2 lb, roughly 6 to 8 cups shredded), 1 cup coconut and 3/4 cup blanched slivered almonds gives the "plenty" the text asks for. Dress with 3/4 cup mayonnaise folded into 1/2 cup cream whipped to soft peaks.
- Blanching almondsWhole almonds go into boiling water for 60 seconds, then the skins slip off between finger and thumb; slice them while still damp. Packaged slivered almonds are already blanched and can be used straight, toasted lightly or not.
- The dressingFold the whipped cream into the mayonnaise rather than the reverse, and dress the cabbage no more than 20 minutes before serving. Cabbage weeps salt and water into a cream dressing and the whole thing turns to thin liquid in the bowl.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseA period mayonnaise is uncooked yolk, and this salad is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- Paprika and peppers"Dashes of paprika" here is colour on a white salad, so use sweet Hungarian paprika rather than smoked or hot. The "green sweet peppers" are ordinary green bell peppers, cut in thin strips.
- YieldAs written this serves six to eight as a side salad. It is rich enough that a small mound on a lettuce leaf, in the period manner, suits it better than a heaped bowl.
Dromedary was the brand name Hills Brothers Company used for its dates and its packaged shredded coconut, and promotional recipes like this one existed to find new places to put both. That explains the shape of the recipe: coconut is folded into a cabbage slaw not because tradition demanded it but because a company with coconut to sell wanted it treated as a general-purpose ingredient rather than a cake and pie garnish. The dressing is pure early-twentieth-century American salad practice, where mayonnaise thinned with whipped cream was often used as a "company" treatment for anything served on a lettuce leaf, and paprika was a common finishing touch, valued for its colour more than its flavour. Sweet salads of this kind, cabbage or apple bound in creamy dressing with nuts and dried fruit, are close kin to the ambrosias still on American tables.