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Pineapple Salad
Drain juice from 1 can sliced pineapple and cut fruit in 1/4-inch cubes. Pile in centers of 8 nests of lettuce leaves. Cover 1/4 cup pistachio nuts with Boiling water and boil 1 minute. Remove skins and cut in fine shreds. Sprinkle over the pineapple. Cut. 5 ripe olives in narrow strips and sprinkle over the nuts. Serve Cooked Mayonnaise Dressing separately.
A composed salad from the era when luncheon plates were assembled rather than tossed. Nothing here is difficult; the only real work is the pistachios.
- PineappleA can of sliced pineapple of the usual size runs around 20 oz and will give something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of quarter-inch dice once drained. Drain it well and blot the cubes, or the juice will thin the dressing on the plate.
- Blanching the pistachiosThe one-minute boil is to loosen the skins, not to cook the nuts. Drain and slip the skins off while still warm; cold nuts hold their skins fast. The point is the green colour, which the papery skin dulls.
- Ripe olivesIn American usage of the period "ripe olives" means canned black olives, commonly California-grown, mild and firm, not brined Kalamatas. Five olives across eight plates is a garnish measure, meant for colour contrast against the green nuts.
- Cooked Mayonnaise DressingThis is the period's boiled dressing, typically egg, vinegar, a little flour or cornstarch and butter, thickened over water and cooled, though formulas varied. It is tarter and lighter than jarred mayonnaise. Any modern boiled or cooked salad dressing stands in; plain mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of the drained pineapple juice is closer in effect than mayonnaise alone.
- Lettuce nestsUse the cupped inner leaves of iceberg or butter lettuce, two or three per plate, chilled and thoroughly dry. The leaves are structural, so limp lettuce collapses the whole arrangement.
- Yield and timingEight small salad plates, as the eight nests in the recipe indicate. Assemble shortly before serving and keep chilled; the leaves will soften once the fruit and dressing sit on them.
Salads like this belong to the American ladies' luncheon of the early twentieth century, when a course was judged as much by how it looked on the plate as by how it tasted. The pattern recurs constantly: a lettuce cup, a mound of fruit, a scattering of something coloured and expensive on top, and a cooked dressing served apart so the diner could take as little as she liked. Canned pineapple made the dish possible at all outside the tropics, and in the early decades of the century Hawaiian canneries brought it within reach of ordinary households, where it carried a lingering air of luxury. Pistachios and ripe olives were the flourish, chosen chiefly for green against black against pale gold. Cooked or boiled dressing, thickened with egg and starch rather than built on raw yolk and oil, was a standard American salad sauce of the period; it was often said to keep better in a household without reliable refrigeration, and period writers frequently presented it as more wholesome than the French oil dressing.