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Strawberry--Orange--Cheese Salad
Arrange three lettuce leaves on each individual salad plate with stems meeting in center. In one lettuce leaf place whole small strawberries, washed and hulled; in the second lettuce leaf place sections of orange free from skin and membrane, and on third leaf balls of cream cheese size of the strawberries, rolled in chopped nuts. Serve Cream French dressing with this. May be used as a dessert.
A composed salad that depends entirely on arrangement, so do the assembly last and keep the three components cold and separate until then.
- Lettuce leavesThe recipe specifies only "lettuce leaves." Whole cupped leaves of the sort a head lettuce yields hold their contents like small bowls; flatter leaf lettuces will let the three piles run together.
- Cream French dressingIn this period French dressing meant oil with vinegar or lemon juice and seasoning, in proportions that vary from book to book; the "cream" version has cream beaten into it. It should coat rather than pool. Dress at the table or the strawberries will bleed into the cheese.
- Cream cheese ballsCream cheese of this period was generally softer than the firm block product sold now. Let modern block cheese come to room temperature before rolling, then chill the finished balls firm before they go on the plate.
- NutsWalnuts or pecans suit it. Keep the chopped nuts dry and cool; damp nuts will not adhere.
- OrangesCutting sections free of skin and membrane means supreming -- slice off peel and pith, then cut each segment away from the dividing walls. Drain the segments well on paper towel or the plate will flood.
- QuantityFigure three or four small strawberries, three or four orange sections and two cheese balls per plate. Strawberries much larger than a cheese ball spoil the visual symmetry the recipe is built on.
- As dessertIf serving it at the end of the meal, as the last line suggests, sweeten the dressing slightly with honey or confectioners' sugar and cut back the vinegar.
Bridge party luncheons are associated with a whole genre of American salad in the 1920s and 1930s: small, cold, brightly coloured, arranged rather than tossed, and capable of sitting on a plate while four hands were busy with cards. The fashion ran to salads laid out in deliberate geometry -- here a three-pointed wheel of lettuce with a different filling in each spoke -- rather than heaped in a bowl. Cream cheese rolled into balls and coated in chopped nuts is one of the era's recurring moves, appearing in numerous fruit salads of the period; it supplied the richness that fruit alone lacked. The note that the salad "may be used as a dessert" reflects a genuine ambiguity in the period's menus, where sweet fruit salads with cream dressings often closed the meal outright.