October Salad
2 tablespoons powdered sugar 1/2 cup canned cherries 3 tablespoons lemon juice 4 autumn leaves Select hard red apples; wash and dry them; cut a slice from the top of each and remove the hearts. After taking the cores from the hearts chop them together with the grape-fruit and cherries; mix with the sugar and lemon juice and return to the apple cases. Place each apple on a brilliant autumn leaf.
A stuffed-apple salad from the era when a salad was expected to be a centerpiece as much as a course. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the apples and grapefruit appear only in the method — so read the instructions first and shop from those.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives sugar, cherries and lemon juice but omits the apples and the grapefruit, both of which the method calls for. Four apples and one medium grapefruit, sectioned and cut up, fill out the proportions sensibly against 1/2 cup cherries.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period this usually meant a fine-ground sugar, finer than granulated but not necessarily the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar dissolves cleanly into the lemon juice and fruit and is the closer match.
- "Remove the hearts"This means hollowing out the apple to make a cup — scoop the flesh, then cut the core out of what you removed and chop the rest as filling. A melon baller or a grapefruit spoon does the work without splitting the shell; leave a wall about 1/2 inch thick.
- Keeping the cups paleThe hinge of the dish is speed. Cut apples brown within minutes, so rub the inside of each shell and the chopped flesh with some of the lemon juice as you go rather than saving all of it for the final mixing.
- Canned cherriesCanned cherries of the period were commonly packed in syrup. Drain them well or the filling will slump; if you use jarred sour cherries, taste before adding the full 2 tablespoons of sugar.
- The autumn leavesPurely a plate liner, and never eaten. Choose an unsprayed leaf from a species you can identify — maple, oak, sweetgum — wash and dry it, and keep away from roadside foliage and ornamentals such as oleander, yew or rhododendron.
- Apples to use"Hard red apples" meant a firm keeper that would stand upright without collapsing. Braeburn, Empire, Honeycrisp or Gala hold their shape; Red Delicious looks right but goes mealy.
- Yield and servingFour apples, four leaves: four servings, meant to go out as individual salad plates. Assemble no more than half an hour ahead and hold in the refrigerator.
Loose-leaf cook books like Mrs. Fryer's were sold as binders so a housekeeper could add pages, and they leaned heavily on the salad fashion that swept American home cooking in the 1900s and 1910s — fruit in a hollowed shell, set on something decorative, arranged rather than tossed. Grapefruit is the tell: it moved from a Florida curiosity to a fixture on Northern tables gradually across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as cultivation, marketing and the expansion of the railroads all played their part, and its appearance in a household book signals that a citrus once considered a luxury had become ordinary enough to chop up with apples. The autumn leaf under each apple belongs to the same impulse that produced lettuce-leaf cups and paper frills: garnish drawn straight from the season, costing nothing, and doing the work that a printed menu card or a course of its own could not.