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Pineapple Salad
Shred one pineapple; add same amount of white grapes, skinned and seeded, equal amount of celery cut in small pieces, and one half cup castana nuts shredded finely. Moisten with cream mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce leaves and garnish with red cherries.
A fruit-and-celery salad of the type that dominated American ladies' luncheons in the early 1900s. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the four ingredients have changed since it was written.
- Castana nuts"Castana" is the Spanish castaña, chestnut. Use cooked, peeled chestnuts (vacuum-packed are fine) shredded or shaved thin, about 2 to 2 1/2 oz for the half cup. If you substitute blanched almonds or walnuts you get a good salad, but not this one.
- Cream mayonnaiseNot a bottled product. It is mayonnaise folded with an equal or lesser volume of unsweetened whipped cream, sometimes with a little lemon. Fold it in at the last minute; it loosens and weeps if the salad sits.
- Grapes"Skinned and seeded" reflects the table grapes of the period, which had seeds and were commonly peeled for salads; the white grapes intended would most likely have been Malaga or a similar variety. Halved seedless green grapes do the same job with none of the labor.
- The pineappleOne pineapple, shredded, sets the scale for everything else: equal volumes of grapes and celery. A medium pineapple yields roughly 3 cups of flesh, so expect about 9 cups of salad before dressing. Drain the shredded pineapple well or the mayonnaise will thin out.
- CeleryUse the pale inner ribs, not the outer stalks, and cut them small as directed. Outer celery is stringy and its flavor overwhelms the fruit.
- Red cherriesThe garnish most likely means candied or maraschino cherries, which were available year-round by this period. Fresh sweet cherries in season work and taste better.
- Yield and servingEnough for 8 to 10 as a luncheon salad on individual lettuce cups. Chill the components separately, dress and plate immediately, and serve cold.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — a general household cookbook issued as advertising, in the same tradition as the Royal Baking Powder and Rumford pamphlets. Its salad chapter belongs squarely to the era when American "salad" meant fruit, nuts and celery bound in mayonnaise and set on a lettuce leaf, the leaf serving as a plate liner rather than something eaten. Canned Hawaiian pineapple had become cheap and widely available in these years, which may help explain how often pineapple turns up in cookbooks of the decade, though this recipe calls for a whole fresh fruit; the chestnut, by contrast, was still a common American nut, as the blight that destroyed the native chestnut forests was first identified in New York in 1904 and had not yet finished its work.