Home › Salads › Molded Fruit Salad
Molded Fruit Salad
1 cup boiled dressing. 1/2 cup whipped cream. 1 rounding tablespoon gelatin soaked in 1/4 cup water.
Mix cream and dressing together, pour in gradually the cooled gelatin. Have ready one can white cherries, one small bottle maraschino cherries, one can pineapple, one cup nuts. Cut in small pieces. Drain and dry in towel. Sprinkle with salt; fold lightly in dressing. Put into mold and let stand on ice several hours.
A gelatin salad of the sort that filled American cookbooks between the wars, held together by boiled dressing rather than by fruit juice. Two things decide whether it sets: the gelatin must be fully dissolved and still liquid when it meets the dressing, and the fruit must be dry.
- Dry the fruit properlyThis is the hinge. Canned fruit carries enough syrup to thin the dressing and weep into the mold overnight. Drain it, spread it on a towel, and blot the pieces individually before folding them in.
- Gelatin quantity and handlingA rounding tablespoon of granulated gelatin is a little more than a level tablespoon (3 teaspoons), or somewhere between one and one and a half envelopes of modern gelatin. Soften it in the 1/4 cup cold water, then melt it gently and let it cool to barely warm before adding, as the recipe's 'cooled gelatin' implies. Added hot it can curdle the cream; added too cool it will set in ropes.
- Boiled dressingMrs. Wilson assumes you have a jar of it on hand: a cooked dressing of egg, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, sugar and milk, tart and thick like a thin custard. It is not mayonnaise and not vinaigrette. Commercial cooked salad dressing is the nearest thing on a shelf today.
- White cherriesCanned white cherries meant Royal Anne or Napoleon in light syrup, pale yellow-pink and firm. Canned light sweet cherries or a jar of cocktail cherries stand in; ordinary dark sweet cherries will bleed pink through the whole mold.
- Maraschino cherriesSome cherries of this period were still put up in a sweetened liqueur or a heavy almond-flavored syrup, though the brined, bleached and dyed American style was already common by 1920. Modern ones are sweeter still, and best rinsed and dried before use.
- "Stand on ice"An icebox instruction, which means the refrigerator now. Give it the several hours the recipe asks for; overnight is better. Chill the mold and film it with a little oil or rinse it with cold water so it releases.
- UnmoldingA cream-and-gelatin salad is soft. Dip the mold briefly in warm water, loosen the edge, and turn it out onto a chilled plate lined with lettuce; do not try to slice it until it has been out of the mold a minute or two.
- YieldDepending on the size of the cans, the quantities will fill something between a 1-quart and a 1 1/2-quart mold and serve roughly six to eight as a salad course.
Molded salads like this belong to the period when powdered gelatin was well established in ordinary households, and when the ability to serve something cold, sliceable and geometric read as modern and refined. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia newspaper readers and for the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, and her books lean hard on canned goods -- pineapple, white cherries, maraschinos -- as the mark of a well-stocked shelf rather than a compromise. The boiled dressing base is older than the gelatin: cooked dressings predate commercial mayonnaise in American kitchens. A salad of canned fruit, nuts and sweetened dressing, presented as a salad rather than a dessert, tells you most of what you need to know about where the line fell in 1920.