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Apple Salads
Green or red uncooked apples may be scooped out and filled with popcorn nuts, celery, and some fruit other than the apple, mixed with its cubed pulp, bound together with mayonnaise. Garnish with nasturtium or grape or other graceful leaves. Chopped apple makes an agreeable addition to almost any of the vegetable and many of the fruit salads.
This is a formula rather than a recipe, in the manner of turn-of-the-century salad chapters: it gives the idea and expects the cook to supply the proportions. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- "Popcorn nuts"The phrase is genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means popped corn and nuts, though some readers take it as a nut variety. Either reading works in the bowl; popped corn goes soggy within minutes of meeting mayonnaise, so add it at the table.
- Choosing the applesYou need a firm, thick-walled apple that will stand up as a cup — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Honeycrisp. Mealy or thin-skinned varieties collapse when hollowed. Slice off the top, scoop with a melon baller, and leave a wall about a quarter inch thick.
- The hinge: acidulate at onceCut apple browns in minutes. Brush the hollowed shells inside and out with lemon juice and toss the cubed pulp in lemon juice as you cut it. Without this the salad looks tired before it reaches the table.
- The mayonnaiseA cook of this period would have whisked this fresh from raw yolks. Use commercial mayonnaise or one made with pasteurised egg, and thin it with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice so it coats the fruit rather than clumping.
- "Some fruit other than the apple"Grapes halved and seeded, orange or tangerine segments with the membrane removed, and diced pear all work. Avoid anything very wet — melon and fresh pineapple will water down the dressing in the shell.
- The garnish leavesNasturtium and grape leaves are both edible, though the recipe's word "graceful" suggests they were picked for appearance. "Other graceful leaves" is where the modern cook should be careful: many decorative foliage plants sold today are toxic. Stick to nasturtium, grape, lettuce or celery leaf.
- CeleryCut it fine — matchstick or 1/8-inch dice. Large pieces overwhelm the apple, and the older stalks in a bunch are stringy enough to need peeling with a swivel peeler.
- Yield and servingOne filled apple per person, as a first course or a side with cold poultry. Assemble no more than half an hour ahead and keep the shells refrigerated, standing upright in a dish so they do not tip.
Fruit salads bound with mayonnaise look strange now but were in fashion on American tables when this was written: the Waldorf salad, apple and celery in mayonnaise, is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s, and cookbooks went on ringing changes on it. The hollowed fruit used as its own serving dish belongs to the same moment, when a salad was judged as much on presentation as on flavour and the garnish of leaves mattered as much as the filling. Note too what the entry assumes about apples \, in green and red, and needed suggestions for using them up.