Fruit Salad
The fruit salad may be a combination of bananas, oranges, and pineapple, to which a few almonds and candied cherries may be added. Serve with mayonnaise.
A one-line formula rather than a set of instructions, typical of the salad chapters in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, where the cook was expected to supply proportions and dressing from experience. A few decisions have to be made before it works on a modern table.
- The mayonnaise questionIn 1911 a "mayonnaise" served with fruit was often a sweetened or cooked dressing, sometimes thinned with fruit juice and lightened with whipped cream, rather than the savory egg-and-oil emulsion sold in jars today, though plain mayonnaise was also used this way. Straight commercial mayonnaise over oranges and bananas is a jarring combination to many modern palates; a cream-based fruit dressing or a boiled dressing folded with whipped cream is one reasonable reading of what was meant.
- ProportionsFor four servings, figure roughly two bananas, three oranges and about a cup of pineapple, with a quarter cup of almonds and a dozen candied cherries. The fruit should be in bite-size pieces, not the thin fanned slices of a modern plate.
- OrangesSection the oranges free of membrane and drain them; the loose juice will otherwise thin the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. Navels are easier to segment than the thin-skinned juice varieties.
- BananasCut them last and toss with a little of the orange juice, or they will brown before the salad reaches the table. This salad does not hold; assemble within half an hour of serving.
- PineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will not affect this salad but will prevent any gelatin-based dressing from setting and, over time, will break down the proteins in a dairy dressing and turn it bitter. Canned pineapple, heat-treated, poses neither problem, and was already common in 1911.
- AlmondsBlanched and split, or lightly toasted and slivered. Whole skin-on almonds are too hard against soft fruit.
- ServingA common period presentation was a cup of crisp lettuce with the fruit heaped inside and the dressing spooned over, served as a salad course before dessert or as a light luncheon dish.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef; Estes was born into slavery in Tennessee and spent years cooking in Pullman dining cars before joining the subsidiary of United States Steel in Chicago. Fruit salad dressed with mayonnaise sounds strange now, but it was thoroughly fashionable then: homemade mayonnaise dressings were the mark of a modern salad course, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s applied them to fruit as readily as to chicken or lobster. The ingredients themselves signal the period as much as the dressing does. Bananas, oranges and pineapple were all recent arrivals in the ordinary American larder, made routine by refrigerated shipping and commercial canning, and candied cherries carried a slight air of luxury. A dish like this on a dining-car menu was a small demonstration that the railroad could put tropical fruit in front of a passenger in the middle of Illinois in winter.