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Cherry Salad
Stone half a pound of cherries and save all the juice. Take the whitest leaves of a nice head of lettuce and wash them thoroughly. Slice a small cucumber and chop fine a dozen blanched almonds. Mix all gently together, arrange on the lettuce leaves, and pour over a dressing made of a gill of cherry juice, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a drop or two of almond extract and four tablespoons of sugar. Serve very cold.- Mary F: Snider.
A sweet-dressed fruit and vegetable salad of the kind that filled American cookbooks around 1900. The measurements are simple, but the juice quantity needs thought before you start.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces. That is the amount of cherry juice called for in the dressing.
- The juice will not add upHalf a pound of cherries, stoned over a bowl, gives perhaps two tablespoons of free juice — nowhere near a gill. Either buy bottled unsweetened cherry juice for the dressing, or crush and strain a second half pound of cherries to get the volume.
- CherriesThe four tablespoons of sugar suggest sour cherries, which were widely grown in home gardens at the time. With sweet cherries such as Bing, cut the sugar to one or two tablespoons and taste.
- Blanched almondsAlmonds with the brown skins slipped off, after a minute in boiling water. Packaged blanched slivered almonds work; chop them fine as directed so they read as texture rather than nuts.
- Almond extractA drop or two means exactly that. Modern extract is concentrated and a heavy hand turns the whole bowl medicinal. Add it to the dressing, not to the fruit, so it disperses.
- The dressing is a syrupThere is no oil and no vinegar here — it is sweetened juice, closer to a light syrup than a vinaigrette. Stir until the sugar has fully dissolved before pouring, or it will grit at the bottom of the plate.
- Assemble lateSliced cucumber weeps and lettuce wilts under sugar and acid. Chill the components separately, then combine, dress and serve. "Serve very cold" is the point of the dish.
- YieldEnough for four small salad plates as a course between others, or two as a light lunch salad.
Fruit salads dressed with sweetened juice rather than oil belong to a distinct turn-of-the-century American genre, sitting somewhere between a salad and a dessert and often served on lettuce leaves as a separate course. The combination of cherries, cucumber and almonds also reflects the period's fondness for pairing fruit with something crisp and something rich, a habit that later hardened into the mayonnaise-bound fruit salads of the 1920s. The recipe is credited to a named contributor, Mary F. Snider, in the manner of the many collections assembled from readers' submissions. The drop of almond extract is doing double duty: cherries and almonds are botanical relatives, both in the genus Prunus, and the extract echoes a flavor also found in the fruit's stones.