Apricot Salad
Pare, cut the apricots in halves, and remove the stones. Arrange the halves neatly in a bowl, with the stone sides up; then pour over them Fruit Salad Dressing, No. 2, stand in a cold place one hour, and serve.
A two-line fruit salad that depends entirely on the fruit and the dressing it never quite spells out. The whole thing hinges on apricots that are ripe enough to peel and sweet enough to need no cooking.
- The missing dressing"Fruit Salad Dressing, No. 2" is a cross-reference to another page of the same book, so its contents are not recoverable from this page. Numbered fruit-salad dressings of the period varied: some were a simple sugar syrup with lemon or orange juice, sometimes sharpened with sherry or maraschino, others were cooked egg or cream dressings. If you cannot consult the original, a light citrus-and-sugar syrup will serve; a quarter cup per pound of fruit is a starting point, not the book's measure.
- Paring apricotsRipe apricot skin is thin and slips off after 30 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water. Trying to pare a firm apricot with a knife wastes half the fruit; if the skins will not slip, the fruit is not ripe enough for this dish.
- Ripeness matters more than anythingThere is no cooking and no added sugar beyond the dressing, so underripe supermarket apricots will taste sour and cottony. Let them soften at room temperature until they yield to a thumb and smell floral.
- Why stone side upThe recipe gives no reason, but the hollow left by the stone will hold the dressing, which is the likely point of the arrangement. Cut the halves cleanly along the natural seam so they sit level in the bowl.
- BrowningCut apricot flesh oxidizes within minutes. Acid in the dressing slows it, so pour the dressing on immediately rather than arranging the whole bowl dry and dressing it later.
- "A cold place"Before mechanical refrigeration this meant an icebox or a cellar. The refrigerator does the job, but cover the bowl; an hour is enough to chill and macerate without the halves collapsing.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. About 1 1/2 lb of apricots, roughly 10 to 12 fruit, will serve four as a light course or dessert.
This comes from the era when "salad" still covered anything dressed and served cold, and hot-weather cookbooks leaned hard on it: no fire, no oven, nothing that had to be watched. Such books were aimed at households in American cities before mechanical refrigeration, where an August range made the kitchen unbearable and the icebox was the only cold storage available. The recipe assumes fruit good enough to serve raw with nothing but sweetened juice. The cross-referenced dressing is typical of the period's cookbook structure, where a handful of numbered base preparations were meant to be learned once and applied across dozens of dishes.