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Valentine Salad No. 2
1 ring of pineapple. 1 heart cut out of pimento and put on top of the ring. Pass mayonnaise and lay an arrow made from bread across the heart. Have more toasted bread arrows on side of the plate. Serve on lettuce. Cut a few stuffed olives and lay around ring.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, and it is written as shorthand for a cook who already knows what a composed fruit salad looks like on a plate. The quantities given are per serving.
- YieldOne ring of pineapple per plate means one serving. Scale everything by the number of guests; a large can of pineapple rings typically holds eight to ten.
- PineappleCanned rings in juice, drained and blotted dry, behave best. Wet fruit slides on the lettuce and thins the mayonnaise into a puddle.
- PimentoPimentos here are the soft, sweet red peppers sold jarred, roasted and skinned, not a pimento cheese spread. Pat a whole one flat on a board and cut the heart with a small paring knife or a tiny cutter; a jarred roasted red pepper is the closest supermarket substitute.
- "Pass mayonnaise"Most likely means the dressing goes to the table separately rather than over the salad, so the arrangement is not disturbed, though the wording is ambiguous. Homemade mayonnaise of the period used raw yolk, so use a commercial jarred mayonnaise if the salad will stand at room temperature.
- Bread arrowsCut them from firm white sandwich bread with the crusts off, then toast until crisp and dry. Untoasted bread goes limp within minutes against wet fruit; the recipe specifies toasted arrows for the extras on the side.
- Stuffed olivesGreen olives stuffed with pimento, sliced into rounds so the red centre shows. Six or eight slices ring a plate.
- Assembly and timingBuild these no more than half an hour before serving and hold them chilled. The toasted arrows should be laid on at the last moment.
Mrs. Wilson's book belongs to a moment when American salads were less about greens than about arrangement: a leaf of lettuce as a mat, a ring or mound of fruit, a decorative accent, and mayonnaise as the binding gesture. Holiday salads for Valentine's Day, Washington's Birthday and St. Patrick's Day appear regularly in cookbooks and newspaper food columns of the period, and Mary A. Wilson wrote such a column in Philadelphia. The hearts and arrows here depend on canned pineapple and jarred pimentos being available year-round, which by 1920 they were. That this is "No. 2" indicates at least one other Valentine salad in the book.