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Pear Grape Salad
2 cups diced pears 1 cup grapes, seeded and halved Lettuce Mix the fruit, marinate with boiled dressing and serve on the lettuce leaves.
A two-ingredient fruit salad from the period when a cooked, flour-thickened dressing stood in for mayonnaise. Everything hinges on the dressing, which the recipe assumes you already have on hand.
- Boiled dressingThis is the standard cooked salad dressing of the era: egg yolks, vinegar, sugar, mustard, a little flour or cornstarch, thickened over hot water and cooled. It is tangier and thinner than mayonnaise. If you are not making one, a thinned honey-lemon or yogurt dressing sits closer to it than mayonnaise does.
- Marinate brieflyFruit weeps quickly in an acid dressing. Ten to fifteen minutes chilled is enough; an hour gives you pears sitting in a pool of thin syrup.
- PearsFirm-ripe Bosc or Anjou hold their dice. Bartlett at full ripeness will collapse into the dressing. Toss the cut pears with a little lemon juice to keep them pale.
- GrapesThe instruction to seed implies a seeded variety such as Tokay or Malaga, still common at the time; seedless red or green grapes need only halving. Halve them rather than leaving whole so they take up dressing.
- LettuceThe leaves serve as a bed for the fruit, and cup-shaped iceberg or butter lettuce leaves suit that purpose. Chill and dry them thoroughly or the dressing slides straight off.
- YieldThree cups of dressed fruit serves four as a side salad, or two as a lunch plate with cheese or nuts added.
Boiled dressing predates commercial mayonnaise in American home cooking and remained common in salads like this one. Fruit salads served in a lettuce cup were a fixture of the menu-planning books of the 1920s and 1930s, which organized whole weeks of meals around a fixed rotation of courses: a fruit salad filled the required "salad" slot cheaply, and pears and grapes were both reliably available and shipped well.