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Pineapple and Cream-Cheese Salad
6 slices canned pineapple 1 cup cream cheese Purple grape-juice French dressing Lettuce leaves Work enough grape-juice into the cream cheese to soften it so that it can be made into balls with the hands or with butter paddles. Add the grape-juice cautiously so as not to make the mixture too soft to handle. Place a slice of pineapple on a lettuce leaf, put a cheese ball on top and pour grape-juice and French dressing over all.
A composed salad of the 1920s type, assembled rather than cooked. Everything depends on getting the cheese soft enough to roll but firm enough to hold a ball.
- Add the grape juice drop by dropThis is the hinge. Cream cheese goes from stiff to slack very quickly, and once it is too loose no amount of chilling will bring it back. Work in the juice half a teaspoon at a time, and stop while the paste still holds a shape under the paddles.
- Cream cheese, then and nowIn 1929 this meant a soft fresh cheese sold in bulk or in small foil-wrapped bricks, generally moister than today's stabilized block. Modern cream cheese is stiffer and is easier to work if it is left at room temperature for a while first. One cup is roughly 8 oz.
- Butter paddlesRidged wooden paddles used to shape butter into pats and balls. A pair of small spoons dipped in cold water, or simply cool damp hands, does the same job.
- French dressing of the periodA plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name now. Three parts oil to one part vinegar suits the pineapple.
- Grape juicePurple bottled grape juice of the period would most likely have been Concord; the recipe does not say whether it is sweetened. Sweetened juice will make the cheese cloying against the canned fruit, which is already sugary.
- Drain the pineappleCanned pineapple packed in syrup should be drained and blotted, or the syrup will thin the dressing into a puddle on the plate. Fruit packed in juice is the better choice.
- Assemble lateThe grape juice bleeds into the cheese and the lettuce wilts under the dressing. Chill the balls and the pineapple separately and put the plates together just before serving.
- YieldSix salads, as a first course or a luncheon plate.