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Fruit Salad
10 large apples, 1 large tin pineapple, 1 cup marachino cherries, 1 pound dates, 1 stalk celery, 1 pound malaga or tokay grapes cut in small pieces. Mix with 1½ cups of salad dressing.
— Mrs. Fred Churchill
A church-supper quantity fruit salad of the Waldorf type, written for cooks who already knew what "salad dressing" meant in their own kitchens. A few of the ingredient names need translating before you shop.
- Scale and yieldTen apples plus a pound each of dates and grapes fills a very large bowl and serves roughly 20 to 25 as a side salad. Halve or quarter everything for a household portion.
- "1 stalk celery"In period usage a stalk often meant the whole head, what a supermarket now sells as a bunch, though the word was also used loosely for a single rib. Judged against ten apples, five or six ribs, finely diced, seems about right; the celery is there for crunch and salt, not bulk.
- The tin of pineappleA "large tin" of the era is the No. 2 or No. 2½ can, about 20 to 29 oz. Drain it well and reserve the juice — a spoonful thins the dressing and keeps the apples from browning.
- GrapesMalaga and Tokay were common seeded table grapes of the period, and both run large, which may be why the recipe says to cut them small. With modern seedless red or green grapes, halving is enough.
- DatesOften sold then in pressed blocks; check for pits even in packages labeled pitted, and chop them rather than adding whole. Tossing the chopped dates in a little of the dressing keeps them from clumping.
- Which salad dressingIn books of this kind "salad dressing" may well mean a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour and slackened with cream rather than modern jarred mayonnaise, though mayonnaise on fruit was also common by this date. Mayonnaise folded half-and-half with whipped cream gives a lighter result; straight mayonnaise is heavy against this much fruit.
- Order of workCut the apples last and directly into the drained pineapple juice or a little lemon juice. Dress and chill no more than an hour or two before serving — held overnight, the apples weep and the dressing turns watery.
- Maraschino cherriesThen a bar and confectionery item, brine-cured and dyed; a cup is largely for color. Drain and pat them dry or the pink bleeds through the whole bowl.
Philathea was the name of the young women's adult Bible class movement that grew out of the Baraca class organizing of the 1890s, and its chapters produced fundraising cookbooks by the score in the early twentieth century — recipes collected under the contributors' married names, as here, and sized for a hall rather than a family. The salad itself belongs to the American mayonnaise-and-fruit style that spread rapidly after the Waldorf salad of apple and celery became famous in the 1890s; canned pineapple and maraschino cherries, brine-cured and dyed rather than candied, were what let a Northern church kitchen serve fruit in quantity out of season. The combination of sweet fruit with an egg-based dressing looks odd now, but it was the ordinary understanding of "salad" in this period, when the word meant something dressed rather than something green.