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Clown Salad
Doris Kaiser Linders.
Roll the lettuce to be used for foundation, and shred fine. Arrange the desired amount on each plate and place a slice of pineapple in the center. Put salad dressing in the circle of pineapple. Arrange two filberts to represent eyes, a strip of pimento for mouth and a tiny triangle of pimento for nose.
Ruth A. Willers.
A face-on-a-plate salad of the kind church and club cookbooks produced by the dozen. It is assembly rather than cooking, so the only real questions are what the ingredient names mean and what dressing was intended.
- Roll and shred"Roll the lettuce" means stacking the leaves, rolling them into a cigar and slicing across into fine ribbons — what a modern cook would call chiffonade. Iceberg or another crisp head lettuce holds the shape; tender leaf lettuces collapse into wet threads.
- FilbertsFilbert is the older American name for the hazelnut, still used interchangeably in the Pacific Northwest. Two whole blanched nuts, rounded side up, give the eyes; skinned nuts read as eyes more clearly than the brown-skinned kind.
- Salad dressingThe recipe does not say which dressing. In books of this period "salad dressing" could mean a sweet cooked boiled dressing or its bottled descendant as readily as mayonnaise; either suits the pineapple.
- PineappleA canned pineapple ring, drained well and blotted, is what the recipe assumes; the hole in the center holds the dressing. Fresh pineapple will need coring to give the same ring, and gives off more juice onto the lettuce.
- PimentoJarred pimentos, packed whole or in strips, cut easily with kitchen scissors. Drain and pat dry or the red bleeds into the dressing.
- Assembly and timingBuild these no more than half an hour before serving and keep them cold. The dressing softens the pineapple edge and the lettuce wilts under it fairly quickly.
- YieldOne plate per person, one pineapple ring each. Scale by the number of place settings rather than by volume.
Novelty "face" salads belong to a particular stretch of American home entertaining, roughly the 1920s through the 1950s, when canned pineapple had become cheap and reliable and hostesses were encouraged to make the salad course decorative. Cookbooks of the period are full of candle salads, bunny salads and clown salads, generally built on a lettuce bed with canned fruit and a bottled or boiled dressing, and often aimed at children's parties, church suppers or luncheon plates where the visual joke did the work. The double attribution here — a name at the head and another at the foot — appears in compiled community books, though what it signifies in this instance is not recoverable from the text.