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Pear Salad (Use canned pears good)
Use canned pears (good quality-small size). Stuff with cheese:- One cake Philadelphia cheese-mix with mayonnaise, little lemon juice or vinegar, chopped nuts, chopped green pepper, salt, paprika. Mix into a paste. Cut out center of pear a little and put the cheese inside of half-pears. Put together with toothpicks. Use strawberry jello -when cool, pour jello around pears that have been placed in jelly glasses.
Set in ice-box to cool. For dressing use mayonnaise, thinned with whipping cream. Doris Kaiser Linders. 1 can pears Salad dressing
A congealed salad of the church-supper type: cream cheese filling piped into canned pear halves, then suspended in strawberry gelatin. The original assumes you know the standard package sizes of its day and gives no quantity for the gelatin at all.
- One cake Philadelphia cheeseThe small foil-wrapped cake sold in this period was 3 ounces; the modern brick is 8 ounces. One 3-oz package, or a third of a standard brick, is enough to fill about four pear halves.
- The jello is unmeasuredNo quantity is given. One 3-oz box of strawberry gelatin made up to a full 2 cups of liquid will set four to six individual glasses. Using slightly less water than the box directs gives a firmer set that will hold the pear in place instead of letting it float.
- "When cool" is the hingePour the gelatin when it is cool and beginning to thicken to the consistency of raw egg white, not while hot. Hot gelatin softens the cheese filling and lets the pear halves bob to the top, and the pear syrup clinging to the fruit will thin it further. Drain and blot the pears first.
- Jelly glassesSquat 6-8 oz jars with straight sides. Any small tumbler, ramekin or wide-mouth canning jar works; straight or flaring sides matter if you intend to unmould, since a shouldered jar will not release.
- ToothpicksThey hold the two halves together while the gelatin sets. Count them in and pull them out before serving, or leave the pears as filled halves cut side down, which is easier to portion.
- Set in ice-boxRefrigerate at least 4 hours, better overnight. An icebox ran warmer and less evenly than a modern refrigerator, which may be why the original gives no timing at all.
- The dressingMayonnaise thinned with unwhipped heavy cream to a pourable consistency, roughly three parts mayonnaise to one part cream. Spoon it over at the table; on the plate ahead of time it slides off the gelatin.
- YieldDepending on can size, a can of pear halves gives roughly four to eight halves, so two to four assembled whole pears, or several individual moulds served as a salad course.
Fruit-and-cream-cheese salads set in flavored gelatin were among the most fashionable American dishes of the 1920s and 1930s, and they are common in church and club fundraising cookbooks of the era. Powdered flavored gelatin, sold in boxes from the 1890s onward, put a dish that once required a cook's stock of calf's-foot or sheet gelatin within reach of any household, and cream cheese sold in small foil cakes made the filling equally quick. If such a salad appears here among pickles and relishes rather than with the salads, that may reflect a common understanding of these sweet-tart moulded dishes as an accompaniment served alongside the meat course rather than as a dessert. The attribution to a named contributor, Doris Kaiser Linders, is the standard form of the community cookbook, where recipes carried their donors' names as a kind of signature.