Home › Pickles-Relishes › Pear Salad (T salt t mustard C vinegar C)
Pear Salad (T salt t mustard C vinegar C)
1 t salt 1 t mustard ¼ C vinegar ¾ C cold water Cook until thick. When cool add 12 marshmallows cut up, ½ C pecans. Before serving add 1 cup heavy cream whipped. Put half a pear on lettuce and put this dressing over pear.
A church-supper pear salad in the old American style: a cooked, vinegar-sharp dressing that is chilled, loosened with whipped cream, and spooned over fruit on lettuce. The dressing is the whole job, and it is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Do not let the dressing boilCooked dressings of this type are best brought up gently, in a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, and pulled the moment they coat the spoon. Note that no egg or flour appears in the ingredients as transcribed, so it is unclear what is meant to do the thickening.
- The vinegar and water quantitiesThese read as quarter- and three-quarter-cup measures, but the fractions in this line are not fully legible; treat them as approximate and taste the cooled base before adding cream. A dressing of this size wants roughly three parts water to one part vinegar.
- Mustard"1 t mustard" most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared table mustard; prepared mustard would make it both looser and sharper.
- Chill before adding creamWhipped cream folded into warm dressing will deflate and thin out. The base must be cold, not merely cool, and the finished dressing should be assembled shortly before serving.
- MarshmallowsMarshmallows of the period were larger and softer than modern miniatures, and the recipe's instruction to cut them up fits that; twelve of them is roughly a cup and a half to two cups of modern miniatures. The figure "12" may itself be a mangled fraction, as "14" and "34" are in the same recipe.
- PecansA cup and a half is generous. Toast them dry at 350F for six to eight minutes and cool completely, or they will taste flat against the cream.
- The pearsCanned pear halves, drained and blotted, are the likeliest intent and still work well; a ripe fresh Bartlett half is good but sheds juice into the dressing.
- YieldEnough dressing for eight to ten pear halves, which is a serving apiece.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this one were common before bottled mayonnaise was widely available in the American home kitchen: a base of vinegar, water, mustard and salt thickened over gentle heat, then softened with cream. The marshmallow-and-nut finish places it in the broad twentieth-century family of fruit salads bound in sweetened cream that filled community cookbooks from the 1920s onward, and half a pear on a lettuce leaf with a spoonful of dressing was both a salad and, by the standards of the day, a decoration.