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Pineapple and Green Pepper Salad
Stuff a green pepper with well seasoned cream cheese and chill. When ready to serve put on each plate a few crisp lettuce leaves. On lettuce put 1 t boiled dressing. Lay 1 slice canned pineapple on the dressing and a thin slice of the stuffed pepper cut in a ring on the pineapple. Sprinkle a little paprika on the slice of stuffed pepper.
A composed salad rather than a cooked dish, so the work is all in the chilling and the knife. Two details in the original need translating: the dressing and the abbreviation.
- Chill until firm, then sliceThe whole thing depends on the stuffed pepper setting solid enough to cut into clean rings. Pack the cheese in with no air pockets, wrap the pepper tightly, and give it at least four hours in the refrigerator, preferably overnight. Slice with a thin sharp knife, wiping the blade between cuts.
- "1 t" is ambiguousLower-case t conventionally means teaspoon and T tablespoon, though the page itself gives no key. A teaspoon of dressing under a pineapple ring is barely a smear; a tablespoon is closer to what the plate wants; use your judgment.
- Boiled dressingA cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, sugar, mustard and a little flour or cornstarch, thickened over water and cooled — tart and custardy rather than rich. Books of this kind often carry a recipe for it elsewhere. Thinned mayonnaise is not the same thing; a bought creamy coleslaw dressing is nearer in flavor.
- Cream cheese then and nowPeriod cream cheese was generally softer and less stabilized than the bricks sold today, and may have been tangier. Beat modern cream cheese with a spoonful of cream to loosen it before stuffing, or it will crack when sliced.
- "Well seasoned" means season itThe recipe leans entirely on this. Salt, white pepper, a little onion or chive, sometimes chopped pimiento or a dash of Worcestershire. Unseasoned cheese against sweet canned pineapple gives you nothing.
- Preparing the pepperCut off the stem end, hollow it, and remove every seed and rib so the ring cuts evenly. Leave it raw and crisp — blanching softens it and it will not hold a ring.
- PineappleThe recipe specifies only canned pineapple; period cans were usually syrup-packed. Juice-packed rings, drained and blotted dry, work best today, as syrup can make the plate cloying. Fresh rings weep and will slide.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A medium bell pepper should give something like eight to ten thin rings, so one pepper covers roughly eight plates at one pineapple ring each.
This is a salad built entirely from the canned-goods aisle of its day, and that is the point. Commercial pineapple canning in Hawaii expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century, and by the 1910s and 1920s sliced pineapple was cheap and available year-round well inland, where fresh pineapple was not. Community cookbooks of the period are full of such plates: a lettuce leaf, a ring of something canned, a dab of dressing, and a sprinkle of paprika for color — a "salad" in the American sense of a composed cold course, not a bowl of leaves. Boiled dressing belongs to the same moment, a cooked egg-and-vinegar sauce that home cooks made before jarred mayonnaise became widely available; it kept better than a raw-egg dressing in a household without reliable refrigeration.