Tasty Salad
Wash, then soak in cold water, the inside leaves of tender lettuce, drain it, dry it on a napkin and arrange it tastefully on a flat dish; make a salad by slicing 2 bananas, 12 white grapes, 1 stalk of celery and 24 peanuts, or any preferred kind of nut; mix well and spread it on the leaves, then cover it with mayonnaise or French dressing; serve with salted wafers and neufchatel cheese, ice cold.
A fruit-and-nut salad of the type that filled American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are timing and temperature.
- Assemble at the last minuteSliced bananas brown quickly once cut, and here the dressing is poured over the top rather than tossed through, so the fruit gets little protection from its acid. Cut the bananas last, dress immediately, and serve. A squeeze of lemon over the slices is a reasonable insurance policy.
- Soaking the lettuceThe cold-water soak is a crisping step from the days before refrigerated produce. Fifteen to thirty minutes in ice water then a thorough dry in a towel or spinner does the same job; wet leaves will not hold dressing.
- White grapesMeans green table grapes. Many grapes of the period had seeds and would have needed halving and seeding, though seedless varieties were also available; modern seedless grapes can be halved or left whole.
- PeanutsTwenty-four peanut kernels is only about two tablespoons (nearer a quarter cup if whole shells, two kernels each, were meant). Use roasted and salted or plain roasted, and chop them coarsely so they distribute rather than roll off the leaves.
- NeufchatelThe American Neufchatel intended here is a soft fresh cheese, essentially cream cheese with less fat, sold in blocks. It is not the French bloomy-rind Neufchâtel, which would be a different dish entirely.
- Salted wafersThin crisp crackers of the water-biscuit or saltine type. Any plain cracker serves.
- DressingMayonnaise here would have been the thick homemade boiled or emulsified kind; jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice pours more kindly over lettuce. French dressing in this period means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled version.
- YieldAs written this serves two generously or four as a first course.
Salads of fruit, nuts and lettuce bound with mayonnaise were a fixture of American cooking from the 1890s through the 1930s, when bananas had become cheap and reliably available through year-round steamship imports and mayonnaise had moved from a French restaurant preparation to a household staple. The combination looks odd now, but it belongs to a moment when "salad" meant almost anything arranged on a lettuce leaf and masked with dressing. Bananas, celery and peanuts were among the cheapest things in the market, and the Neufchatel, offered on the side, is the costliest item in the list. The instruction to arrange the leaves "tastefully" reflects the period's conviction that a salad's appearance was half its worth.