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Apple, Banana and Celery Salad
1 cup diced celery 2 small apples, diced Mix with mayonnaise dressing.
Few chopped nuts 2 or 3 medium sized bananas Mrs. Clair Smart.
Pears 2 egg yolks 1 T flour 1 T sugar Lettuce
A three-ingredient fruit-and-celery salad of the kind that filled church cookbooks in the early twentieth century. The ingredient list runs in two columns, so read it as: 1 cup diced celery, 2 small apples diced, 2 or 3 medium bananas, a few chopped nuts, bound with mayonnaise.
- Cut the bananas lastBanana turns to paste the moment it is stirred more than necessary. Dice the celery and apple, dress them, then fold in banana in thick coins just before serving.
- Keep the apple from browningToss the diced apple in a little lemon juice before it meets the other ingredients. A firm tart variety holds its shape against the soft banana.
- "Mayonnaise dressing" in 1900"Mayonnaise dressing" -- In community cookbooks of this period the phrase often meant a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg yolk and flour rather than the emulsified jarred product, though it can equally mean true mayonnaise; this book does not say which. Jarred mayonnaise works, and thinning it with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice gets closer to the softer texture a boiled dressing would give.
- NutsThe recipe says only "few chopped nuts"; walnuts or pecans are the likely intent. Toast them briefly and add at the table so they stay crisp.
- ServingFruit salads of this kind were commonly served on a lettuce leaf, individually plated. Figure four small servings from these quantities.
- BalanceTwo apples and up to three bananas against one cup of celery skews sweet by modern taste. Increasing the celery to a cup and a half sharpens it without changing the character of the dish.
Fruit salads bound with mayonnaise were a mark of modern, refined eating in American home cooking from roughly the 1890s through the 1930s; commercial mayonnaise reached ordinary households in the 1910s and after, and iceboxes became steadily more reliable over the same span. The apple-and-celery combination is the backbone of what would later be standardized as Waldorf salad, generally traced to New York's Waldorf hotel in the 1890s, where it was originally made with apple, celery and mayonnaise, nuts being added later; adding banana was a thrifty domestic variation.