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Frozen Fruit Salad
1 can white cherries. 1 can crushed pineapple 25c can marachino cherries 1 lb. white grapes Lorna Vanston. ¼ lb. pecan meats 1½ cake Anona cheese 1 pt. mayonnaise dressing 1 qt. whipping cream Mash cheese and mix with the mayonnaise. Add to the fruit which has been cut in small pieces and drained. Add cream whipped very stiff. Place in round paper ice cream cartons and freeze several hours or over night. When ready to serve push bottom of carton through and slice salad as desired. Serve on lettuce Fannie Grinnell.
A still-frozen salad of the type that filled American community cookbooks between the wars: no churning, no eggs, just whipped cream and cheese carrying drained fruit. A few of the quantities are printed as prices or with lost decimal points, and two contributors' names have collided in the typesetting.
- The hinge: drain everything hardCanned pineapple, cherries and grapes all carry syrup and juice, and any liquid left in them freezes into gritty ice crystals that wreck the texture. Drain the fruit in a sieve, then blot it dry on towels before it goes into the cream.
- "14 lb. pecan meats"A dropped fraction: read it as ¼ lb, about 1 cup of pecan halves, chopped. Fourteen pounds of pecans would cost more than the rest of the salad combined and would not fit in the bowl.
- Anona cheeseAn early twentieth-century branded cream cheese, sold like others of its day in small cakes. Substitute cream cheese by weight: if a cake was the usual 3 oz of the period, 1½ cakes is roughly 4 to 5 oz. Have it fully soft before mashing or it will stay in lumps that freeze hard.
- "25c can" of cherriesPriced rather than measured. A small jar of maraschino cherries, about 4 oz drained, is the right order of magnitude; halve or quarter them.
- A pint of mayonnaiseThat is 2 cups. "Mayonnaise dressing" in this period often meant a sweeter cooked salad dressing rather than plain mayonnaise, so the quantity may not be an error. If you use ordinary jarred mayonnaise the result will read as savoury; a sweeter dressing, or mayonnaise slackened with a spoonful of sugar and a little lemon, is probably nearer the original intent. Use commercial mayonnaise rather than a raw-yolk homemade one, since nothing here is ever cooked.
- White grapesGreen grapes in period usage. Market grapes of the day often had seeds and needed halving and pitting; today halving is enough, and they should be halved so they do not freeze into marbles.
- Freezing without a churnThis is a still-frozen mixture, so the whipped cream must be stiff enough to hold air through several hours in the freezer — whip to firm peaks, then fold, do not stir. Folding the fruit in with a light hand is what keeps it from being a solid block.
- Moulds and slicingRound waxed ice cream cartons are the mould; a loaf pan or two 1-quart round containers lined with plastic wrap do the same job. Let the frozen salad stand 10 to 15 minutes at room temperature before slicing, or the knife will shatter it.
- YieldA quart of cream plus a pint of dressing and the fruit makes a very large salad, enough for a crowd rather than a family. Halving the recipe works without adjustment.
- The two names"Lorna Vanston" sits mid-ingredient list and "Fannie Grinnell" at the end; two adjacent contributors' credits appear to have run together in the text. Ignore both when cooking.
Frozen fruit salads were a genuine craze in American home cooking from the 1920s through the 1940s, and community cookbooks are thick with them. They depended on two things arriving in the middle-class kitchen at once: mechanical refrigeration with a freezing compartment, which let a hostess freeze something solid without ice and salt and a crank, and cheap branded cream cheese and bottled mayonnaise, which supplied a base that would set without eggs or gelatin. The combination of sweet fruit, cheese, mayonnaise and whipped cream, served in slices on a lettuce leaf, sat in a category modern cooks no longer have — the "salad" that was really a chilled course served apart from the dessert. The maraschino cherries and canned pineapple were pantry goods bought for occasions, and the cherries here are priced by the can rather than measured by weight.