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Delicious Salad
6 slices pineapple. 2 C marshmallows. 1 C blanched almonds. 1 C whipping cream. 1/8 t mustard. 3 T chopped pimentoes ⅛ C whipping cream Mrs. H. E. Gaddis. 2. T sugar 1st mustard ¼ t salt 1 T lemon juice Cut pineapple in cubes and drain. Cut marshmallows into small pieces (with scissors). Blanch almonds and cut into small pieces. Whip cream. Mix dry ingredients and add lightly to cream. Add lemon juice. Toss pineapple, marshmallows and nuts together lightly. Add cream and pimentoes. Blend carefully. Serve on lettuce with Espiquet French dressing.
Ruby Williams.
This is a whipped-cream fruit salad of the church-supper type, and the ingredient list has come through the printing badly: the quantities for pineapple, marshmallows and almonds never made it onto the page. Treat the cream dressing as the recipe and the fruit as a matter of proportion.
- Reading the abbreviationsT is tablespoon, t is teaspoon, C is cup. "1st mustard" is most likely 1 teaspoon dry mustard, and "14 t salt" is probably 1/4 teaspoon, the fraction having lost its slash in transcription.
- The missing amountsFor 1 cup of cream, a workable ratio is about 2 cups drained pineapple cubes, 1 cup marshmallows and 1/2 cup almonds. The original gives no figures, so this is a reconstruction rather than a conversion.
- Drain the pineapple properlyThis is the hinge. Canned pineapple carries a great deal of syrup, and any of it left behind will thin the whipped cream into soup within an hour. Drain in a sieve, then press gently with a spoon.
- Order of operationsSugar, mustard and salt are folded into the whipped cream, not beaten in beforehand; the lemon juice goes in after.
- Dry mustard in a fruit saladNot an error. A pinch of mustard and salt turns up in a good many period cream dressings, keeping sweet salads from tasting flat.
- MarshmallowsThe instruction to cut them with scissors is sound; a knife drags. Today's bagged miniatures can be substituted whole and left uncut.
- AlmondsBlanching means covering shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute and slipping off the skins. Pre-blanched slivered almonds are a fair substitute, though the flavour is duller.
- The dressing at the end"Espiquet French dressing" appears to be a local or brand name that has not survived. Any plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing of the period is the closest match.
- Timing and yieldAssemble within an hour of serving and keep cold. As written, with the proportions above, it serves six as a salad course.
Fruit-and-whipped-cream salads served on a lettuce leaf were a fixture of American church and club cookbooks from the 1920s through the 1960s, and this one carries all the markers: canned pineapple, marshmallows, blanched almonds and chopped pimiento for colour. Their popularity tracked the spread of commercially canned pineapple and cheap bagged marshmallows, which turned what had been a labour-intensive dish into something a cook could assemble from the pantry. Two names appear on this page, Mrs. H. E. Gaddis and Ruby Williams; what that pairing signifies is unclear, since a second name at the foot of a page may belong to the dressing or be a typesetting artifact as easily as it may mark a second contributor.