Home › Christmas Dinners › Pineapple and Green Pepper Salad
Pineapple and Green Pepper Salad
Stuff a green pepper with well seasoned cream cheese and chill. When ready to serve put on each plate a few crisp leaves of lettuce; on lettuce put one teaspoon boiled dressing. Lay one slice of canned pineapple on the dressing and a thin slice of the stuffed pepper cut in a ring on the pineapple. Sprinkle a little paprika on the slice of stuffed pepper.
A composed salad built for looks: the hinge is chilling the stuffed pepper long enough that it slices into clean rings without collapsing.
- Stuffing the pepperCut off the stem end, remove seeds and ribs, and pack the cheese in tightly from the wide end with a spoon handle or a piping bag so there are no air pockets. Air pockets are what make the rings fall apart when cut.
- Chill timeWrap the filled pepper and refrigerate at least 3 hours, preferably overnight. Slice with a thin sharp knife into rings about 1/4 inch thick.
- Cream cheeseThe full-fat block type is what is wanted; whipped or spreadable tubs contain too much added water and will not set firm. "Well seasoned" is not specified here; salt and paprika are the obvious choices, and a little grated onion, mustard or chopped pimiento would not be out of place.
- Boiled dressingNot mayonnaise. Boiled dressing is a cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, sugar, mustard and a little flour or cornstarch, thickened over water and cooled; it is tart and slightly sweet rather than rich. Versions appear in many period cookbooks, and it must be cold before it touches the lettuce.
- Canned pineappleSliced rings packed in juice rather than heavy syrup suit the sharp dressing better. Drain them well and blot on a towel, or the dressing thins and runs across the plate.
- Green pepperChoose a narrow, straight-sided pepper rather than a wide blocky bell, so the ring sits within the circle of the pineapple slice. A red or yellow pepper works but loses the intended green-and-yellow contrast.
- Yield and servingOne medium pepper will give roughly 8 to 10 thin slices, so a single pepper covers that many plates; the recipe itself gives no yield. Assemble immediately before serving, since the lettuce wilts quickly under the dressing.
Salads like this belong to the era when American home entertaining prized the plated "composed" salad, arranged in layers on individual plates rather than tossed in a bowl, and judged largely on its appearance in the center of the plate. Canned pineapple helped make the style possible: by the 1920s Hawaiian canned pineapple was widely available, uniform in size and cheap, and its round slices were a common base for stacked salads. The cream-cheese-stuffed pepper, sliced into rings, is the same trick applied to a vegetable, and similar stuffed-pepper rings appear in other period books. Boiled dressing was a common alternative to homemade mayonnaise, using less oil.