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Cantaloupe & Cherry Salad
1 can Royal Anne cherries or 1 lb. Oxheart cherries Pecans or filberts Mayonnaise Lettuce leaves Mrs. Geo. Ives.
Scoop out cantaloupe meat in little round balls. Remove seeds from cherries and stuff each one with a nut. Serve an equal amount of cantaloupe and cherries in a curved lettuce leaf and cover with a little mayonnaise. Mrs. C. R. Galloway.
SHREDDED WHEAT "SALAD" Cut shredded wheat in halves and line a deep bread pan with them, both sides and ends. Then put a layer of left-over fruit (any kind) on top, then a layer of nuts. Fill pan with fruit and nuts until one-fourth inch from the top, then put a layer of shredded wheat shells on top of fruit. Have dissolved Plymouth Rock Gelatine (pink or white) and while hot pour over all ingredients and set aside to cool. When hard, put out on platter and slice. Serve with whipped cream. Very delicious. Mrs. Ida McKibben.
A fruit salad of the sort that filled the salad pages of American church cookbooks between the wars: little melon balls, stuffed cherries, a lettuce cup and a spoonful of mayonnaise. It needs no cooking, so the whole result rides on the fruit and on how cold everything is.
- The cantaloupeThe cantaloupe is named only in the method; the printed ingredient list as set appears above another contributor's name. One ripe cantaloupe of about 3 lb yields roughly 3 cups of balls, in the same ballpark as a pound of cherries.
- Royal Anne and OxheartRoyal Anne is a pale yellow-and-blush sweet cherry, long favoured for canning and for maraschinos; drained canned Rainiers are the closest supermarket equivalent. Oxheart is an old heart-shaped dark sweet cherry, so any firm Bing-type will stand in.
- Pitting and stuffingPush the pit out from the stem end with a cherry pitter or a sturdy straw so the fruit stays whole with a single opening, then press in a pecan half or a whole filbert. Canned cherries are soft and tear easily; drain them well and handle them cold.
- FilbertsFilbert is the older American name for hazelnut. Toast and rub off the skins before stuffing, or the papery skin turns bitter against the sweet fruit.
- Melon ballsA standard melon baller cuts about 1 inch. Scoop with the melon held cut-side down over a bowl so the juice drains away rather than thinning the mayonnaise on the plate.
- The mayonnaiseMayonnaise on fruit salad was common in this period, and period cookbooks often lighten it with whipped cream. A tablespoon per serving is plenty; more reads as heavy now.
- ServingChill the fruit at least an hour and dress only at the table, or the melon weeps. A pound of cherries with one melon serves six as a first course or a side salad.
Molded and composed fruit salads were the showpiece of the American community cookbook from about 1910 through the 1950s, and mayonnaise on fruit was not then the oddity it sounds: commercial jarred mayonnaise arrived in American groceries in the 1910s and was promoted hard as an all-purpose salad dressing, sweet salads included. Royal Anne cherries, the American name for the European Napoleon and commonly said to have been rechristened after reaching West Coast nurseries, were canned in enormous quantity from Oregon and Washington, which is why a cook could call for a can of them out of season and a pound of fresh Oxhearts in July. The stuffed-cherry-with-a-nut trick shows up in a great many contributor recipes of the era; it is fussy handwork of the kind a church supper committee had willing hands for.