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Christmas Candle Salad
Place a thick slice of pineapple on a lettuce leaf. Cut a banana in halves crosswise. Place on end in the center of the pineapple. Insert tooth pick in a red cherry and place in the top end of banana. Put mayonnaise around edge of the pineapple. 1 cantaloupe
An assembly salad rather than a cooked dish, so the only real work is choosing fruit that will stand up straight and stay put.
- The stray cantaloupeThe "1 cantaloupe" at the end belongs to no step in the instructions; nothing in the method uses melon. It may be a stray line from an adjoining recipe or the remnant of an omitted variation, but there is no way to tell from the page itself. Ignore it.
- PineappleThe recipe says only "a thick slice." Canned rings are the easy choice, since the hole is already cut and centred, though a fresh slice cored the same way works. Drain well on paper towel or the mayonnaise will slide off the edge.
- Making the candle standCut the banana halves flat and square, not on a diagonal, and set the cut end down. A short banana with some firmness left holds vertical; anything soft will lean within minutes.
- BrowningCut bananas oxidise fast. Brush the exposed surfaces with lemon or pineapple juice and assemble immediately before serving rather than plating ahead.
- The cherryA maraschino or other bright red cherry is the likely intent, standing in for a flame. Pat it dry so the dye does not bleed down the banana.
- MayonnaiseThe original just says mayonnaise. Salad dressings served with fruit in this period were often sweeter or lightened with cream, so if a modern savoury jarred mayonnaise tastes wrong, folding in a spoonful of whipped cream will soften it.
- ToothpicksThe pick is structural and stays in the finished plate. Mention it when serving, or use a single long cocktail pick that is easy to see.
- YieldOne pineapple ring and one banana half per plate; a standard can of rings and three bananas will make six salads.
Fruit-and-mayonnaise salads arranged into pictures were a staple of American church and club cookery from roughly the 1910s through the 1950s, when the salad course was as much a piece of table decoration as it was food. The candle salad in particular circulated widely in community cookbooks and home economics classes, and appeared under Christmas headings. Such books were often loosely organised: sweet fruit salads, spiced fruits and true pickles could all be filed together as the things you set alongside the meat. The dish is now more often remembered with amusement than affection, but it shows plainly what canned pineapple and cheap bananas meant to a cook in the era, a bright, out-of-season fruit plate assembled from the pantry shelf in December.