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Fruit Salad with Cocoanut
1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 4 bananas, sliced 4 oranges, diced 2 cups canned pineapple, diced 1 cup white cherries, stoned A few nut meats Crisp lettuce leaves Cream mayonnaise dressing Mix cocoanut with bananas, oranges, pineapple, canned cherries which have been stuffed with nut meats. Serve on lettuce leaves or in a salad dish surrounded with lettuce leaves and pass cream mayonnaise dressing.
A composed fruit salad of the packaged-goods era, built to show off a can of coconut and a can of pineapple. Two things in it need translating: the coconut itself and the dressing.
- Dromedary CocoanutA brand of shredded coconut sold in a carton; it was generally drier-packed and less heavily sweetened than most of today's bagged sweetened flake. Unsweetened fine-shred coconut is the closer match; if you use sweetened flake, cut the quantity to about three-quarters of a cup or the salad tips into dessert.
- Cream mayonnaise dressingNot a bottled product. It means mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream, roughly two parts mayonnaise to one part cream whipped to soft peaks and folded in, sometimes with a spoonful of the pineapple syrup. Fold it just before serving; it loosens as it sits.
- White cherriesPale sweet cherries such as Royal Ann, sold canned in light syrup. Modern canned light-coloured sweet cherries, or good jarred maraschinos in juice, will stand in; drain them well or the syrup thins the dressing.
- Stoning and stuffingThe cherries are pitted and each one filled with a piece of nut meat; the recipe does not say which nut, and walnut, pecan or blanched almond all suit. Do this first, before anything else is cut, because it is the only slow step.
- Bananas lastSlice them at the end and turn them through the orange juice released by dicing, or they will brown and go slack while you work on the cherries.
- DrainingDiced oranges and canned pineapple both shed a great deal of liquid. Drain both in a sieve for ten minutes and reserve the pineapple syrup for the dressing, otherwise the salad sits in a pool.
- Yield and servingAs written this fills a large bowl and serves eight to ten as a salad course or light lunch dish. Assemble and chill no more than an hour ahead; the coconut absorbs juice and the bananas soften beyond that.
Fruit salad dressed with mayonnaise looks strange now, but in the 1910s and 1920s it was standard American practice: fruit belonged to the salad course, and the salad course meant a boiled or mayonnaise dressing, softened with whipped cream when the fruit was sweet. The lettuce leaf underneath is the marker of that convention — it signals "salad" whatever is piled on it. This particular version mixes fresh fruit with packaged goods, and the packaged side is the period's real story: canned pineapple, canned white cherries and shelf-stable shredded coconut had recently become cheap and reliable enough that a cook far from any orchard could put a tropical-looking dish on the table in February.