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Fruit Salad (Cup walnuts layer dates pint)
1/2 cup walnuts 1 layer dates 1/2 pint cream Slice all the fruit into a colander. Then add the dates after the stones have been removed. Put two heaping tablespoons salad dressing into the cream that has been whipped. Then add the fruit and mix gently.
Miss Lillian Casey.
A community-cookbook fruit salad of the whipped-cream-and-boiled-dressing school, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed her reader already knew the drill. A few gaps need filling before it will work.
- The fruit is missingThe instruction says "slice all the fruit" but the surviving ingredient line names only walnuts and dates. Salads of this type commonly used bananas, oranges, canned pineapple or apples; whatever quantity you settle on, you are choosing for her, not following her.
- A layer of dates"Layer" dates were a grocery format of the period, dates packed in layers in a flat box, sold unpitted; the recipe's direction to remove the stones fits that. Box sizes varied, so treat the quantity as approximate -- roughly half a pound to a pound of pitted dates, chopped.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup, and it must be cream sold for whipping (roughly 30 percent fat or more). Half-and-half and cartons labelled "light" will not hold a whip.
- "Salad dressing"In cookbooks of this kind the term often meant a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and sharpened with vinegar and mustard rather than an oil-based mayonnaise, though the name covered both. Two heaping tablespoons is meant to cut the cream, so a tart cooked dressing is a reasonable reading of the intent.
- The colander is the hingeSlicing the fruit into a colander lets the juice run off. Skip it and the free liquid from oranges and pineapple will thin the whipped cream into soup within the hour.
- Fold, then chill brieflyWhip the cream to soft peaks, fold in the dressing, then the drained fruit and nuts. Serve within an hour or two; cream-dressed fruit salads weep on standing and do not keep to the next day.
- YieldSince the fruit quantity is missing, any yield is a guess: a quart or so of prepared fruit would serve six to eight as a salad course. Salads of this sort were often served on lettuce leaves, though this recipe does not say so.
Fruit salads bound with whipped cream and a spoonful of boiled dressing were a fixture of American community and club cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1930s, when canned pineapple, dates and oranges had become widely available inland. Sweet fruit mixtures occupied an unsettled place on the menu, filed as relish, accompaniment or dessert according to the compiler's judgement, so a placement outside a salad heading is not unusual. The pressed date "layer" the recipe calls for was a grocery format of the era, and the attribution to Miss Lillian Casey follows the convention of contributor-credited community volumes.