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Fruit Salad (Sliced pineapple Peach halves)
Sliced pineapple Peach halves Mayonnaise dressing French fruit dressing Strawberries or cherries Heart leaves of lettuce Allow a slice of pineapple to each person. If fresh pineapple is used, it should be thickly dusted with sugar, sprinkled with lemon juice, and allowed to stand two hours in a cold place before using. A peachhalf should be used for each person, and if fresh, should be treated in the same manner. Ten minutes before serving time, pour over a little French dressing, made with lemon juice, drain, set a peach-half on each slice of pineapple, put a spoonful of mayonnaise in the cup of each peach, and top with a strawberry or cherry. Garnish with lettuce leaves. 1 can white cherries
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, and it stands or falls on how the fruit is prepped. Two details in the original are worth reading twice: the two-hour maceration, and the ten-minute dressing-then-draining step.
- The hinge: dress, then drainThe French dressing is a brief marinade, not a sauce. Ten minutes is enough to season the fruit; drained off, it keeps the mayonnaise from sliding into a pink puddle on the plate.
- French fruit dressingIn a book of this era this usually means a plain vinaigrette of oil and acid with a little sugar and salt, here made with lemon juice instead of vinegar. A common proportion is about three parts oil to one part lemon juice, shaken, with sugar to taste.
- Mayonnaise dressingPeriod mayonnaise was made by hand with raw yolks. Jarred mayonnaise works and is safer for a dish held at room temperature; a spoonful thinned with a little cream or lemon juice sits more neatly in the peach cavity.
- Fresh versus cannedThe recipe assumes canned fruit as the default and treats fresh as the exception needing sugar, lemon and two hours in a cold place. That maceration draws out juice and softens the fruit, so do not skip it if using fresh.
- Peeling fresh peachesHalves need to come away cleanly to hold the mayonnaise. A 30-second dip in boiling water then cold slips the skins; freestone varieties give tidier halves than clingstones.
- Pineapple slicesCanned rings are the likeliest intent. From a fresh pineapple, cut crosswise rounds about half an inch thick and remove the core with a small cutter.
- Heart leaves of lettuceThe pale inner leaves of a head of iceberg or butter lettuce, used as a cup or fan under the fruit. Chill them crisp and dry them well or the plate weeps.
- YieldOne pineapple slice and one peach half per person, so scale directly to the number at table. Assemble no more than a few minutes ahead.
- The stray last line"1 can white cherries" appears with no instructions and may well be the first ingredient line of the following recipe, stranded in the typesetting. Ignore it, or read it as a suggestion that canned white cherries may stand in for the strawberry on top.
Composed fruit salads like this belong to the era when American cookery reclassified sweet fruit as a salad course, served as a main course, dressed with mayonnaise, eaten with a fork. The form depended on the canning industry: Hawaiian canned pineapple became widely and cheaply available in the first decades of the twentieth century, and canned peach halves gave every cook a uniform cup exactly the size of a spoonful of dressing. Church and community cookbooks of the period are full of these stacked, garnished plates, which took no cooking, could be assembled ahead for a crowd, and looked far more expensive than they were he ayonnaise-dressed fruit salads that stayed on American tables into the 1960s.