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Pineapple Salad
Mix one cup tart, chopped pineapple with a shredded grape-fruit and half a cup of chopped nuts or celery. Add fresh, or some form of preserved cherries, and serve on lettuce with mayonnaise dressing.
A composed fruit salad of the sort that filled American cookbooks between about 1900 and 1930. The proportions are loose by design, but a few terms need translating.
- "Tart" pineappleThe recipe specifies tartness rather than a form; fresh pineapple gives the sharpness the word implies, while canned pineapple in syrup is much sweeter and will flatten the contrast with the grapefruit.
- Shredded grape-fruitNot grated. It means the membrane-free segments broken up into coarse shreds with the fingers or a fork. Drain them well or the mayonnaise will slide off the lettuce.
- Nuts or celeryHalf a cup of either, chopped small. Walnuts, pecans or blanched almonds are the nuts most often named in salads of this kind; celery was the thriftier choice and gives salt and crunch rather than richness.
- Preserved cherriesIn this period that could mean home-preserved sour cherries or the bottled maraschino type. Either works; the cherries are for colour more than flavour, so a scattering is enough.
- Mayonnaise dressingHomemade mayonnaise of the period was often thinner and sharper than the jarred kind. If using commercial mayonnaise, loosen it with a spoonful of lemon juice or a little cream so it coats rather than clumps.
- Assemble lateFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which prevents gelatin setting and can thin a dressing over time. Dress it just before it goes to the table.
- YieldAbout four small salads, each on a single cupped lettuce leaf, as a first course or a luncheon side.
Salads like this belong to the moment when pineapple stopped being a luxury centerpiece and became grocery produce. Improved steamship routes and, after 1900, Hawaiian canning put pineapple within reach of ordinary American households, and cookbooks responded with dozens of ways to use it beyond dessert. The formula here nuts, chopped fruit, a lettuce leaf and a spoonful of mayonnaise is the standard template of the era's "fruit salad," which was often served as a savory course rather than strictly as a sweet one; the lettuce and the mayonnaise are what marked it as salad at all. Grapefruit was itself a fashionable novelty in the same decades, said to have been promoted as a breakfast food, and pairing it with pineapple gave the dish two of the period's most talked-about fruits on one plate.