Apple Salad
Scoop out the center of eight red apples with a vegetable scoop. Mix with equal parts of finely chopped celery and boiled dressing. Fill apple shells and serve on bed of curled celery.
Grape Fruit Salad No. I Mix equal quantities of grape fruit and English walnut meats, with one half cup mayonnaise dressing. Serve in grape fruit cups in lettuce nests.
Grape Fruit Salad No. 2 Shred four green peppers, two red peppers, and two grape fruit. Mix with one cup chopped celery and one cup cream dressing. Serve on marinated water cress and garnish with stars of red and green peppers.
Three fruit salads from the era when "salad" meant something sweet, crisp and served in an edible cup. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to make boiled dressing and curl celery; here is what the shorthand covers.
- Vegetable scoopThis is a melon baller, then a standard tool for hollowing fruit neatly. Leave a shell about half an inch thick so the apple stands up under filling.
- Keep the shells from browningThe one step the recipe omits. Brush the cut apple and the scooped flesh with lemon juice as you go, or hold the shells in acidulated water, otherwise you serve brown cups.
- Boiled dressingNot mayonnaise. A cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, mustard, sugar and a little flour or butter, thickened over water and cooled — tart and pourable rather than rich. It is what makes this salad read as period rather than modern.
- Cream dressingIn cookbooks of this period this generally means mayonnaise or boiled dressing lightened with whipped or heavy cream.
- Curled celeryCelery ribs cut in short lengths, fringed lengthwise at both ends with a knife, then left in ice water until the fringes curl back. Half an hour is enough.
- Grape fruitTwo words in 1907, one now. "Shred" here most likely means stripping the membrane and pith off the segments and breaking the flesh apart in threads; the bitter white pith ruins the balance, so drain the fruit before mixing.
- Green and red peppersBell peppers, used raw for crunch and color, not chiles. The garnish stars are cut from flat pieces of pepper wall with a small cutter.
- Marinated water cressWatercress tossed briefly in oil and vinegar just before serving. Dress it at the last moment or it collapses.
- YieldThe apple salad serves eight, one shell each. The recipe gives no yield for either grapefruit salad.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the moment when American fruit salads went from novelty to expectation. Grapefruit was still a comparatively new commercial crop in the United States — Florida groves were expanding rapidly in the first decade of the century — and cookbooks of the period treat it as a smart, slightly luxurious ingredient, here paired with nuts, peppers and celery. Serving a salad inside its own hollowed fruit, on a nest of lettuce or a bed of cress, was a widespread convention in the Boston Cooking School tradition and the many books that followed it, and boiled dressing was a common alternative to mayonnaise.