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Fruit Salad (Env Knox Gelatine T cold water)
1 env. Knox Gelatine 2 T cold water 1 T melted butter Yolks 2 eggs 3 T sugar 1 t salt 1/3 t paprika Olga M. Marshall.
Chicago, Ills.
Pinch cayenne pepper 2/3 C milk 1/3 C vinegar 2 T canned pineapple juice 1 C fruit (cherries, orange pulp and pineapple) 1 C heavy cream, whipped Soak gelatine for five minutes; add melted butter, yolks of eggs, sugar, salt and paprika. Place in double boiler. When warm gradually add milk, then vinegar and pineapple juice. Cook until thick and add gelatine. Remove from fire and beat two minutes. When cool, add fruit, then the whipped cream and the beaten whites of two eggs. Mouldserve with mayonnaise. 6 slices pineapple 2 C marshmallows 1 C blanched almonds
A cooked boiled-dressing custard set with gelatine, lightened with cream and — the sticking point — raw beaten egg whites that never see heat. The transcription is also garbled in two places, which matters before anything else.
- Why it fails as writtenThe yolk mixture is cooked in a double boiler, but the two beaten whites go in at the very end, after the pan has left the fire and the base has cooled. Nothing afterwards raises them above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell egg survives into the finished mould, which is then chilled and served cold. Use a current recipe if you want this kind of set salad.
- The trailing ingredients"6 slices pineapple, 2 C marshmallows, 1 C blanched almonds" appears after the instructions and has no place in them. It is almost certainly the ingredient list of the next recipe in the book, picked up in transcription. Likewise "Olga M. Marshall, Chicago, Ills." is the contributor's credit line, printed in the middle of the column.
- Knox envelopeOne envelope of Knox unflavoured gelatine is about 1/4 oz, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons, and sets about two cups of liquid. Two tablespoons of cold water is a scant soak for it — here the gelatine is stirred into the hot thickened custard, which would finish dissolving the granules.
- T and tCapital T is a tablespoon, lower-case t a teaspoon, C a cup. A full teaspoon of salt in a sweet fruit salad is not a misprint; it belongs to the vinegar dressing, not the fruit.
- "Cook until thick"This is a stirred custard on a yolk-and-vinegar base, thickened over water at a bare simmer. It thickens to coat a spoon and will curdle if the water below is allowed to boil hard — the vinegar makes the yolks less forgiving, not more.
- YieldWith the whipped cream and beaten whites folded in the mixture runs well over a quart; six to eight servings as a salad course, dressed with mayonnaise as directed.
Moulded "fruit salads" of this kind belong to the first great age of packaged gelatine: Knox was selling pre-granulated gelatine in packets by the 1890s — the granulated product replaced the older leaf and sheet gelatine, and single-serving envelopes came later — and by the 1920s and 1930s a congregational cookbook without half a dozen gelatine moulds was unusual. What dates this particular one is the dressing — a cooked boiled dressing of yolks, vinegar, butter and milk, seasoned with salt, paprika and cayenne, the same formula American cooks used for cabbage slaw, here folded with cream and canned pineapple and then served with still more mayonnaise. The result reads as a dessert to modern eyes but was offered as a salad course, and canned pineapple juice in the ingredient list points to the interwar decades, when Hawaiian canneries had made both the fruit and its syrup a year-round pantry staple. Recipes in books like this one carry the contributor's name and town as a matter of course; the credit was part of the fundraising.