Cherry Salad
Lettuce, cherries, mayonnaise dressing, cherry juice, peanuts. Arrange lettuce leaves prettily on a flat dish. Put cherries through the leaves. Pour over a mayonnaise dressing to which has been added a tablespoonful of cherry juice instead of vinegar. Then put a few cherries over the top. Seed the cherries and place a peanut in the center to keep the shape.
A composed fruit salad of the ladies'-luncheon era, given in the shorthand of its day: an ingredient list, a sketch of the arrangement, and no quantities at all. The assembly is straightforward once you decide a few things the original leaves open.
- The hinge: pit from the stem endThe whole effect depends on the cherries holding their shape around a peanut, so work the pit out through the stem hole with a cherry pitter or a bent paper clip rather than halving the fruit. A split cherry will not close around the nut and will bleed juice into the dressing.
- Which cherriesSweet cherries — Bing, Rainier, Lambert — are what this wants; sour pie cherries are too soft and sharp raw. Firm, slightly underripe fruit stuffs and stands better than dead-ripe fruit.
- Cherry juice for vinegarA tablespoon of juice replaces the acid in the dressing, so the mayonnaise will taste a little sweeter and thin slightly. Reserve the juice that collects while pitting; if you want the dressing to hold, whisk in a teaspoon of lemon juice as well, which keeps the acidity without adding a vinegar flavor.
- MayonnaiseThe dressing was most likely made at home, either cooked or hand-beaten. Good jarred mayonnaise works, thinned with the cherry juice; if you make your own with raw yolks, use pasteurized eggs and serve the salad the same hour.
- PeanutsUse blanched, unsalted, skinned peanuts — the red skins bleed and the salt fights the fruit. Halves fit the cavity better than whole nuts in large cherries.
- Quantities and yieldFor four servings, figure a head of leaf or butter lettuce, about 1 lb of cherries (roughly 45 to 55 fruits), 1/2 to 3/4 cup mayonnaise, and a small handful of peanuts. "A flat dish" suggests a single serving platter, arranged and brought to the table whole rather than plated individually.
- Assemble lateDress and garnish within twenty minutes of serving. Cherry juice weeps steadily and will streak the mayonnaise pink and wilt the lettuce underneath.
Fruit salads bound with mayonnaise look strange now but were fashionable at American luncheons in the first decades of the twentieth century, when both home-beaten and commercially bottled mayonnaise were becoming household items and salad was treated as a decorative course rather than a plate of dressed greens. The peanut here is doing structural work as much as culinary: it fills the pitted cavity so the cherry keeps its round silhouette, the same logic behind the stuffed dates, prunes and figs found in books of this type. Substituting fruit juice for vinegar in the dressing turns up in other recipes of the period, where a sweet salad was not meant to taste sharp.