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Pepper and Cream Cheese Salad
1 large green pepper 1 cream cheese Lettuce 2 tablespoons chopped walnuts Mayonnaise dressing Select a large pepper that is sweet; cut off the stem end; remove the seeds and turn it upside down to drain. Mash the cream cheese; mix with the walnuts and press into the pepper, being careful to fill all the crevices. Set away on the ice for several hours; when ready to serve cut into thin slices and serve on crisp lettuce leaves with Mayonnaise dressing. 1 head lettuce
A stuffed-pepper pinwheel salad that depends entirely on a firm chill and a sharp knife. The ingredient list is period shorthand in two places worth clearing up.
- "1 cream cheese"Cream cheese was sold in small foil-wrapped cakes, and a 3-ounce package was a common size; that is most likely what this quantity means. Three ounces is a little over a third of a modern 8-oz brick, and fills one large pepper.
- "Set away on the ice"The refrigerator, and at least three to four hours. The cheese must be genuinely cold and solid all the way through or the rounds will collapse as you cut them.
- The hinge: pack out the airAny gap in the filling becomes a hole in the finished slice and the ring falls apart. Press the cheese in with the back of a spoon or the handle of a wooden spoon, working in small additions rather than one lump.
- SlicingUse a thin, sharp knife and cut rounds about a quarter inch thick, wiping the blade between cuts. Thinner and they tear; thicker and the pepper overwhelms the cheese.
- Choosing the pepper"Select a large pepper that is sweet" suggests sweetness could not be taken for granted; taste-test if you can, and pick one with straight sides so the slices are even circles.
- SeasoningThe original leaves the filling plain. Salt is worth adding, and the cheese takes well to being loosened with a spoonful of cream so it packs without cracking.
- YieldOne pepper gives roughly 10 to 14 slices, enough for four to six small salad plates at two or three rounds each.
Cream cheese stuffed into a hollowed vegetable and sliced into rounds was a standby of American salad cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century, when packaged cream cheese in small foil cakes had become cheap and widely available and cooks were looking for salads that could be made ahead and turned out looking deliberate. The appeal is visual: the cut face shows a pale disc rimmed in green, flecked with walnut, exactly the kind of composed, tidy plate such salads were made for.