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Pear Salad (Green pepper Place halves)
1 green pepper Place halves of pears on lettuce leaves. Cut pepper in strips or small pieces and place on pears. Serve with mayonnaise dressing. Mrs. Dean Bennett.
A three-ingredient plate salad of the kind that filled American church cookbooks from the 1920s through the 1950s. The garbled heading is an artifact of the original layout: the ingredient list read "1 green pepper" and ran straight into the method.
- The pears are cannedThe pears are probably canned -- A recipe this brief most likely assumes canned pear halves in syrup, drained well and patted dry, or the dressing slides off. A 15-oz can gives roughly three or four halves.
- If using fresh pearsChoose Bartlett or Anjou just short of soft, halve, core with a melon baller, and brush with lemon juice to stop browning. Fresh fruit makes a drier, less sweet salad.
- "Mayonnaise dressing"In a book of this vintage this often meant a cooked or boiled dressing — egg, vinegar, sugar, mustard, thickened over heat — rather than jarred mayonnaise. Either works; the boiled kind is sharper and suits the sweet fruit better.
- Lettuce leafA cupped outer leaf of iceberg or Boston lettuce, used as an edible plate. It is structural, not a salad course, so pick leaves that hold their shape.
- Cut the pepper fineGreen bell pepper in period quantities can dominate. Thin julienne or small dice, no more than a tablespoon per pear half, keeps it as garnish and color.
- Serve cold, assemble lateChill the pears and dressing thoroughly, but build the plates just before serving; the lettuce wilts under the fruit fairly quickly.
- YieldOne pear half per person as a side salad, two as a light lunch plate.
Fruit-on-lettuce salads dressed with mayonnaise were a fixture of American home entertaining once commercially canned fruit and bottled mayonnaise became cheap and widely available in the early twentieth century. They offered color, a cool course, and the appearance of effort at almost no cost — exactly the qualities prized in a community cookbook where contributors were feeding suppers and luncheons. The signature, Mrs. Dean Bennett, follows the standard convention of such books, where recipes were credited to the married name of the woman who submitted them; the collections functioned as much as a roster of the community as a manual of cookery.