Home › Date-Cocoanut › Cocoanut and Date Salad
Cocoanut and Date Salad
The fresh cocoanut, cut in cubes, mixed with stoned, halved dates, served on crisp, tender lettuce or young cabbage leaves, makes a pretty and delicious salad. Mayonnaise or a cooked dressing in which lemon juice takes the place of vinegar, gives proper piquancy.
A late-Victorian composed salad with no quantities given, so the work is in proportion and preparation rather than technique.
- Fresh cocoanut means the whole nutPierce the eyes, drain the water, crack the shell and pry out the meat, then pare off the brown skin before cubing. Packaged dried or sweetened shredded coconut will not cube and turns the salad cloying; frozen or vacuum-packed fresh coconut chunks are the practical substitute.
- ProportionsRoughly equal volumes of coconut cubes and halved dates makes a balanced plate, about a cup of each for four salads. Coconut is bland and fatty, dates are pure sugar, so err toward more coconut if the dates are very soft.
- Choice of datesDeglet Noor hold their shape when halved and are the better choice here. Medjool are larger and stickier and will smear the coconut; if using them, chill briefly before pitting.
- Cut sizeCoconut meat is hard and slippery. Quarter-inch cubes cut with a small sharp knife on a towel-lined board give something you can eat with a fork without chasing it around the plate.
- The dressingThe instruction to swap lemon juice for vinegar matters here: dates want acid, and the writer evidently judged vinegar wrong alongside coconut. A cooked dressing in this period usually means a boiled dressing thickened with egg and a little flour, but plain mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice and a pinch of salt does the same job.
- Assemble lateDressing sitting on dates draws out syrup and slackens the mayonnaise. Dress the fruit within a few minutes of serving and spoon it onto the leaves at the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; the amounts suggested above would fill about four small salad plates as a first course or a luncheon side.
Fruit salads dressed with mayonnaise were a fixture of American cookery from the 1890s through the 1920s, when the salad course was still a novelty being naturalised in middle-class homes and cookbook writers reached freely for sweet combinations. Coconut arrived in quantity in the northeastern United States through the trade with the Caribbean, and by the closing decades of the century whole nuts appear to have been cheap enough in city markets to be treated as an ordinary ingredient rather than a curiosity; boxed shredded coconut had also become widely available, which may be one reason the writer specifies fresh. Dates came the other way, imported dried from North Africa and the Persian Gulf, and were a standard grocery item long before commercial date growing began in California. The instruction to substitute lemon juice for vinegar reflects what seems to have been a common preference: acid belongs in a salad dressing, but vinegar was held to be wrong with sweet fruit.