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Sunbonnet Baby Salad
Use halves of canned pears or peaches. Arrange a half of whichever fruit used on a lettuce leaf. Use whole cloves for eyes, blanched almonds for ears, pimento for mouth and nose. Put salad dressing around the top for hair. Bonnet strings, tied under the chin, can be made of pimento.
Ruth A. Willers.
An assembled fruit salad rather than a cooked one, and it stands or falls on presentation. A few notes on the materials and the assumptions behind them.
- Drain the fruit properlyCanned pear or peach halves come out wet, and syrup running onto the lettuce will loosen everything you place on it. Blot the cut side and the rounded side dry on paper towel before arranging, or the cloves and pimento will slide.
- "Salad dressing" hereIn a church cookbook of this kind this means boiled dressing or a thick commercial mayonnaise-type dressing, not vinaigrette. It needs to hold a piped or spooned line without spreading; a stiff mayonnaise works, thinned dressings do not.
- Piping the hairThe original says "put salad dressing around the top," which in practice means a border along the wide end of the fruit half. A small star tip gives a curl that reads as hair; a spoon gives a smear.
- Whole cloves are a hazard, not a garnish to eatCloves are hard, sharply flavoured and easily swallowed whole. Remove them before the plate goes to a child, or substitute a small dark item that is meant to be eaten.
- PimentoJarred pimento, the mild red pepper packed in brine, cut into strips with scissors. Roasted red pepper from a jar behaves the same way; drain and dry it or the colour will bleed into the dressing.
- Blanched almondsWhole blanched almonds, not slivered. They sit flat against the fruit if you press them into a small nick cut with a paring knife.
- Yield and servingOne fruit half per person, on a single leaf of soft lettuce, served cold as the salad course. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and refrigerate; the dressing dulls and the lettuce wilts if it sits longer.
Novelty salads shaped into faces, animals and flowers were a fixture of American church and club cookbooks from roughly the 1910s through the 1950s, and canned fruit made them possible: a pear half is uniform, cheap, always in the cupboard, and conveniently head-shaped. The name borrows from the Sunbonnet Babies, the faceless children in deep bonnets popularised in illustration and schoolbook readers in the first decade of the twentieth century and endlessly reproduced afterward on quilt blocks, postcards and transferware, so the reference would have needed no explanation to anyone buying a Libertyville cookbook. That the salad gives its baby a face, when the whole point of the original figures was that they had none, is the sort of cheerful liberty these contributed recipes take. Its filing under Pickles-Relishes reflects period logic rather than ours: sweet fruit served alongside meat sat in the same category as the pickle dish.