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Date and Cottage Cheese Salad
Dromedary Dates Cottage cheese Chopped pecans or walnuts Mayonnaise dressing Crisp lettuce leaves Lemon, sliced Preserved cherries or pimentos Remove the stones from dates and insert small balls of cottage cheese mixed with chopped nuts. Roll dates in mayonnaise dressing and then in chopped nuts. Serve on lettuce, garnished with lemon slices and cherries or pimentos.
A stuffed-date salad from a branded promotional booklet, written in the shorthand of its era: an ingredient list with no quantities and an assumption that the cook knows what a salad plate should look like. A few points make it work on a modern table.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Figure three to four stuffed dates per person as a first course or lunch-plate salad; a 7-8 oz package of pitted dates, about 6 oz cottage cheese and a half cup of chopped nuts will fill roughly two dozen.
- Dromedary datesA packaged brand of dates, sold both pitted and unpitted; the variety is not stated in the recipe. Any moderately firm date works; Medjool are larger and softer and will slump under handling, so choose Deglet Noor or a similar semi-dry date if you want the fruit to hold its shape.
- Cottage cheeseCottage cheese of this period was often drier and more curd-like than most tubs sold today. Drain modern small-curd cottage cheese in a sieve for twenty minutes, or press it in cheesecloth, or the filling will not roll into balls.
- "Mayonnaise dressing"In books of this vintage this can mean true mayonnaise or a cooked salad dressing thinned with cream. Either works here; thin it slightly with lemon juice so it coats the date rather than clinging in lumps.
- The order of operationsThe dates are rolled in dressing and then in nuts, so the nuts are doing double duty inside and out. Chop the coating nuts finer than the filling nuts and toast them if you like, but let them cool before coating, as warm nuts will soften the dressing and it will slide off.
- Preserved cherriesMost likely maraschino cherries, sold then as now in syrup, though 'preserved cherries' could also mean cherries put up at home. Pimentos are the mild red peppers from a jar, drained and cut into strips.
- Assembly and holdingA mayonnaise-coated date will weep on the plate if it sits. Stuff and chill the dates ahead, then roll in dressing and nuts no more than an hour before serving.
This appears to come from a recipe booklet of the kind issued by makers of packaged dates, one of the great genres of early twentieth-century American food writing: a free pamphlet whose real purpose was to convince households that a packaged pantry item belonged in more than just cake. Dates had long been a holiday and baking ingredient, and pushing them into the salad course was a deliberate expansion of the market. The dish itself sits squarely in the fashion for the sweet fruit-and-mayonnaise salad that dominated American ladies' luncheons from roughly the 1910s through the 1950s, when a bed of crisp lettuce, a glossy coat of dressing and a bright garnish of maraschino or pimento constituted a properly composed plate. Cottage cheese is often said to have been a common partner for fruit in that tradition, valued as much for its whiteness against the dark fruit as for its mildness.