Prune Salad
Cook one pound of large French prunes until tender; when cold remove the stones and chop the prunes and mix with one cup of chopped English walnuts or pecan nuts. Serve on lettuce and cover with French dressing.
A three-line fruit-and-nut salad from the era when "meatless cookery" meant Lenten and wartime menus rather than vegetarianism. Nothing here is difficult; the variables are the prunes and the dressing.
- "French prunes"A variety name, the prune d'Agen widely planted in California, rather than a size grade; note that the recipe specifies "large" separately. Modern pitted prunes are essentially the same fruit and skip the stoning step; buy about 1 lb (roughly 2 1/2 cups) and choose the largest you can find.
- Cooking the prunesCover with water and simmer 15-25 minutes until plump and tender, then cool in the liquid. If your prunes are already soft, a 10-minute soak in hot water is enough — overcooked prunes collapse into a paste and the salad loses all texture.
- Drain them dryThis is the hinge. Wet prunes will thin the dressing into a pink slick at the bottom of the plate. Drain well, blot on a towel, and chop only once they are cold or the pieces smear.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinct from the native American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the fruit. One cup chopped is about 3 1/2 oz; toasting them briefly is not in the original but improves the salad.
- French dressingIn a book of this period this means a simple shaken vinaigrette — about three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and paprika or dry mustard, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in America today. Lemon juice suits prunes better than harsh vinegar.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities would serve roughly four to six as a side salad. Mound on whole lettuce leaves rather than shredded greens, dress at the table, and serve cold; the mixture will sit in the refrigerator a day but the nuts soften.
Fruit-and-nut salads on a lettuce leaf, dressed with oil and vinegar, were a fixture of American cookery from the 1890s through the 1920s, when "salad" often meant something sweet and composed rather than a bowl of greens. Prunes were cheap, kept indefinitely in the pantry, and arrived by rail from California in quantity after the state's plum orchards expanded in the late nineteenth century, which is why they turn up in period cookbooks as dessert, filling, relish and salad alike. Meatless collections had particular use for them: paired with walnuts or pecans, they gave a dish some richness and chew without meat, which mattered on Fridays, during Lent, and on the meat-conserving menus promoted in the United States during the First World War. The combination survives in the walnut-and-dried-fruit salads still served with bitter leaves and a sharp dressing.