Wedding Salad
1 lb. white grapes. 1 lb. marshmallows. 1 can white pears. Split grapes and take out seed. Cut marshmallows in two pieces. Mix lightly with cooked dressing. Fill half pear and serve in cup of lettuce. Make dressing white with whipped cream.
A fruit-and-marshmallow salad of the kind that filled American luncheon menus in the 1920s. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a cooked dressing, so that is where most of the work sits.
- Cooked dressingThis means a boiled dressing: egg yolks, a little flour or cornstarch, vinegar, sugar, mustard and milk, cooked over water until it coats a spoon, then cooled. It must be completely cold before the whipped cream goes in or the cream will slacken and weep.
- "Make dressing white with whipped cream"Fold softly whipped cream into the cold cooked dressing; the recipe gives no proportion. The instruction makes clear the cream is there to lighten the colour as well as enrich. Dress the fruit shortly before serving.
- White grapesTable grapes of this period were commonly seeded, hence the splitting. Modern seedless green grapes need only halving, and a pound is about 3 cups halved.
- MarshmallowsA pound of today's standard marshmallows is a very large quantity against a pound of grapes; half that, cut in two, gives a better balance.
- Canned pearsOne can means pear halves in syrup; can sizes varied, so work with however many halves the tin yields. Drain them well and blot dry, or the syrup will thin the dressing.
- AssemblyThe pear halves are the vessel. Set each cut side up in a cup of lettuce leaf and mound the dressed grape and marshmallow mixture into the hollow.
- Lettuce"Cup of lettuce" means a whole cupped leaf from the heart of an iceberg or butterhead, not shredded leaves. Chill the leaves in cold water and dry them so they hold their shape.
- YieldDepends entirely on the number of pear halves the can holds. Serve as a luncheon or buffet salad rather than alongside a savoury course.
Mrs. Wilson's book belongs to the era when the American "salad" had expanded well past greens to include sweet fruit bound in dressing, served on lettuce as a nod to the category. Marshmallow salads spread in the 1910s and 1920s as commercially made marshmallows and canned fruit became cheap and reliable. The name presumably turns on the whiteness of the finished dish -- white grapes, white marshmallows, pale pears and a dressing deliberately lightened with cream -- though the book does not say so. Cooked or boiled dressing was widely used as a binder in household cookery of the period, being cheaper in eggs and oil than mayonnaise and less prone to breaking in a warm room.