Home › Cocoanut and Date Salads › Date and Pear Salad
Date and Pear Salad
stoned and sliced 1 cup Dromedary Dates, 1/2 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 2 cups canned pears, chopped Cream mayonnaise dressing Crisp lettuce leaves 2 large apples, chopped Line salad plates with lettuce leaves. Mix dates with cocoanut, add pears and apples, fill into the plates, top with dressing and a sprinkling of Dromedary Cocoanut.
A fruit-and-mayonnaise salad of the sort that filled the salad chapter of every branded recipe booklet between the wars. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the terms and assumptions need translating.
- Cream mayonnaise dressingNot a bottled product. It means mayonnaise lightened with cream, in whatever proportion suits; equal parts mayonnaise and cream, whipped or plain, gives a workable version. Make it soft enough to fall from a spoon but thick enough to sit on the fruit.
- Stoned datesSimply pitted. If your dates are whole, split and pit them before measuring; a cup of sliced dates is roughly 5 to 6 oz. Modern Medjools tend to be moister than the pressed dates sold in a carton, so slice rather than chop or they will clump.
- CocoanutThe Dromedary product was shredded coconut. Sweetened flaked coconut from a bag is the nearest easily available thing; unsweetened desiccated will make the salad noticeably less sweet, which is no bad thing given the canned pears.
- Canned pearsDrain them well and pat dry before chopping, or the dressing will slide off into a puddle. Two cups chopped will take more than one 15-oz can drained; allow a large (about 29-oz) can or two small ones. Pears canned in juice rather than heavy syrup keep the salad from being cloying.
- ApplesToss the chopped apple with a little lemon juice as you go. The recipe assumes you are working fast enough not to need it; a firm tart apple left standing will brown before the plates are filled.
- Assembly and timingMix and plate close to serving. Salt and sugar in the dressing draw water out of the apple and pear, and a plated salad left standing in the refrigerator will weep.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities make roughly four generous salad plates, or six as a side with cold meat.
Dromedary was a line of packaged dates, shredded coconut and later cake and pudding mixes sold by the Hills Brothers Company of New York — no relation to the coffee roasters of a similar name — and this booklet exists to give buyers reasons to use more than one product at a time, hence a date salad that also calls for coconut and finishes with a second sprinkling of it. The dish belongs squarely to the American fruit-salad era, when a plate of chopped sweet things bound with mayonnaise counted as a salad course and lettuce functioned as a doily rather than as food. Packaged dates made that possible: before boxed dates reached grocers in quantity in the early twentieth century, dates in the United States were largely a confectioner's import.