Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Salad Combinations (Fruits)
Salad Combinations (Fruits)
1-Diced apple and malaga grapes; French dressing. 2-Orange, apple, banana and cherries; French or mayonnaise dressing. 3-Prunes, cooked until tender, stoned and cut in small pieces. Mix with equal quantity of broken nut meats. Lettuce; French dressing. 4-Diced orange and broken nut meats; sprinkle with lemon juice; let stand one-half hour; French dressing. 5-Banana and chopped walnuts; cream or boiled dressing. 6-1 c. diced pineapple, 2 c. orange, 1 c. diced banana, 1 c. malaga grapes, stoned and peeled. Dressing: 1/2 c. sugar, 3 tbsp. cornstarch, 1 c. pineapple juice, 1 c. hot water. Cook in double-boiler 15 minutes. 7-Dates stuffed with walnuts; French or mayonnaise dressing. 8-Prunes, stones removed and cavities filled with cream cheese; French dressing. 9-Grapefruit and orange; French dressing. 10-Apple, orange and Sultana raisins; French dressing. 11-1 grapefruit, 1 c. malaga grapes, 1 diced orange, 1 c. diced pineapple, 1/2 c. broken walnut meats; French dressing. 12-Cherry and peas; use fresh or canned fruit; lettuce; cream or French dressing. 13-Banana and peanut; cut in slices, marinate in French dressing, roll in chopped peanuts, lettuce, boiled dressing. 14-Pears; cut in halves lengthwise, pare and core; raisins or malaga grapes; pineapple or fruit salad dressing. 15-Banana and pineapple; French dressing. 16-Malaga grapes, shred canned peaches, canned pineapple; fruit salad dressing; lettuce crisp and cold. 17-Heart leaves of endive, diced orange; French dressing.
This is a list of combinations rather than a single recipe, and it assumes you already have French, boiled, mayonnaise and "fruit salad" dressings in your repertoire — all of which appear elsewhere in the salad chapter of books like this one. A few of the ingredients and one of the entries need translation.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm, seeded grape, sold in both white-green and red types and once shipped in cork-packed barrels; a common winter fruit. Any large seedless grape stands in; halve them rather than peeling, since modern skins are thin. (The recipe itself calls for them 'stoned and peeled.')
- French dressing, 1900s senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. It means oil and vinegar or lemon juice with salt and paprika, whisked to a temporary emulsion — for fruit, often with a spoonful of sugar and lemon in place of some of the vinegar.
- Boiled dressingA cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, sugar and a little flour or butter, thickened over water and cooled. It was the everyday alternative to mayonnaise before commercial jars were common, and it is noticeably tangier and lighter.
- Number 6 is a cooked dressing, not a syrupThe half cup sugar, cornstarch, pineapple juice and hot water are cooked together in a double boiler for 15 minutes. The recipe does not say to cool it, but warm cornstarch dressing will wilt bananas and cloud the bowl, so let it come to room temperature first.
- "Cherry and peas" in number 12This reads as a printer's slip; the entry's own instruction to 'use fresh or canned fruit' suggests both items were meant to be fruit, and 'pears' is the obvious candidate. The original is genuinely ambiguous; treat it as a choice, not a conversion.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins. Plumping them in warm water or a little orange juice for ten minutes keeps them from drawing moisture out of the apple.
- Cream cheese for the stuffed prunesIn this period that meant a fresh, unstabilised soft cheese, closer to today's farmer cheese or a plain mascarpone in texture. Modern block cream cheese works but wants softening and a pinch of salt.
- BrowningApple, banana and pear all darken within minutes. Only number 4 mentions lemon juice, but a squeeze over the cut fruit in numbers 1, 2, 5, 10, 13, 14 and 15 is worth doing, and it should be the last thing prepared before serving.
- YieldOf the two measured combinations, number 6 totals about five cups of fruit and number 11 nearer four. Reckon on five or six modest servings on lettuce as a salad course, four if it is standing in for dessert.
Fruit salad in this style belongs to a narrow, identifiable moment in American cooking: the years when refrigerated rail cars, cheap canned Hawaiian pineapple and California citrus put oranges, grapes and pineapple on a winter table at once. The result was a salad course that was really a sweet, dressed with mayonnaise or boiled dressing without anyone finding the combination odd. The Philathea name points to the Baraca–Philathea movement, the adult Sunday-school classes for young women that spread through Protestant churches from the 1890s onward; its local chapters produced fundraising cookbooks. That origin explains the form of this page — not a recipe so much as a crib sheet of seventeen combinations for a woman who had agreed to bring a salad to a church supper and needed the idea more than the instructions.