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Sweet Fruit Salad
Use same ingredients as for pineapple salad, substituting a wine dressing for cream mayonnaise dressing.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the fruit from the book's pineapple salad and swaps the dressing. Everything hinges on finding the parent recipe first.
- Read the pineapple salad firstNothing here can be assembled without the earlier entry, which supplies both the fruit and the proportions. Turn to it in the same Salads section before shopping.
- Cream mayonnaise dressingGenerally mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream folded in shortly before serving; the book's own dressing recipe will give the proportions. It is what the sweet fruit version is replacing, so you do not need to make it.
- Wine dressingPeriod wine dressings for fruit are usually a French dressing in which sherry, Madeira or a sweet white wine replaces some or all of the vinegar, sometimes with sugar. Check the book's own dressing recipes for its version. Whisk the oil in and dress at the last moment.
- Sweet, not tartThe title suggests the wine dressing is meant to be sweeter than the mayonnaise version, so taste it for sugar against the acidity of the pineapple rather than following a fixed ratio.
- Fresh pineapple and gelatineIf any part of the parent recipe sets with gelatine, raw pineapple contains bromelain, which prevents a set. Canned or briefly cooked pineapple has no such effect.
- Cut fruit and browningAny apple, pear or banana in the parent recipe darkens quickly. Cut it last, toss it in a little lemon juice, and keep the salad chilled until it goes to the table.
- YieldSalads of this kind were commonly served in individual portions on a lettuce leaf; scale from whatever quantity the parent recipe gives.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, in 1907 — one of many manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the era that mixed promotional confectionery with a full general-purpose kitchen manual. Sweet fruit salads belong to a distinctly American turn-of-the-century fashion: fruit dressed with mayonnaise or a boiled dressing and set on lettuce, served as a salad course rather than a dessert, which is why an entry like this sits among the vegetable and meat salads. The wine dressing marks the sweeter, more dessert-leaning end of that spectrum.