Guava Salads
Peel and slice as far outside the seed centre as possible, removing seeds remaining on inner side. It is advisable to use either the large pale-yellow pear guava, mild in flavour, or the vermilion-tinted red, tart fruit (the original apple guava). Serve on lettuce or tender cabbage-heart with French dressing. Mayonnaise is, however, sometimes preferred. As with other fruits variety almost without end may be made by adding celery or nuts, other fruits or delicate vegetables.
A method rather than a formula: the whole dish rests on cutting the guava so the reader gets flesh and not seeds. A few notes on the fruit and the dressing.
- The cut is the recipeGuava seeds are hard enough to crack a tooth and sit in a gritty central pulp. Halve the fruit, slice the firm outer wall away from the seed core, then pare any stray seeds off the inner face with the tip of a knife. The seed core is not waste: press it through a sieve and stir the pulp into the dressing.
- Which guava to buyThe "large pale-yellow pear guava" is the common tropical guava, Psidium guajava, sold yellow-skinned with white or pink flesh. The "vermilion-tinted red, tart fruit" is harder to pin down: it may be the strawberry or cattley guava, Psidium cattleianum, a smaller, sharper, plum-sized fruit, or a red, apple-shaped form of the common guava, which is what the phrase "apple guava" usually denotes. Cattley guava turns up occasionally at farmers' markets in Florida, Hawaii and California but rarely in supermarkets.
- RipenessUse fruit that yields slightly to the thumb and smells strongly through the skin. Rock-hard guava is astringent and will not slice cleanly; overripe fruit collapses on the lettuce. Peel only if the skin is tough or blemished, which for tropical guava it often is.
- BrowningCut guava discolours moderately fast. Slice it into the dressing, or squeeze lime over the slices, and assemble within half an hour of cutting.
- French dressing, 1900French dressing -- In a book of this period French dressing means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together — commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar, no sugar and no ketchup. The sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today is a much later, and here quite wrong, thing.
- Tender cabbage-heartThe pale inner leaves of a firm white or Savoy cabbage, used whole or shredded as a lettuce substitute. Worth reviving — it holds its crispness under dressing far better than lettuce does.
- The variationsCelery and nuts is the pairing the recipe itself names; with guava, toasted pecans or macadamias and thin celery work well, as do avocado, orange segments or cucumber. Mayonnaise here would have been homemade, and some period fruit salads thin it with a little cream.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough modern guide, one large pear guava or three or four small red guavas makes a first course or side salad for one.
Guava recipes appear in early twentieth-century American fruit cookery because Florida, Hawaii and southern California were then being promoted hard as sources of new domestic fruit, and cookbook writers accordingly showed readers what to do with produce they had never handled. Guava was already familiar in jelly and paste form ⻝ guava jelly was a long-established Caribbean export and guava cheese is often said to be a Cuban and Brazilian staple — so the interesting move here is treating it as a raw salad fruit rather than a preserve. The fruit-and-mayonnaise salad on a lettuce leaf was a genuine fashion of the period, running from Waldorf salad onwards, and the closing line about "variety almost without end" is the era's characteristic salad logic: a base, a dressing, and whatever the household had. The author's aside that the red fruit is "the original apple guava" reflects an older naming habit in which guava varieties were distinguished as apple- or pear-shaped.