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Apple and Nut Salad
Peel, core, and slice apples and arrange on lettuce, two or three slices in each group. Fill the cavities with chopped salted nuts mixed with stiff mayonnaise and put a spoonful of mayonnaise on top of each. cp do ф ф ф
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it depends entirely on the apple slices holding their shape and colour. The original assumes you are working with whole cored apples cut crosswise into rings.
- Read "cavities" correctlyCoring a whole apple and then slicing crosswise gives rings with a hole in the middle; those holes are the cavities to be filled. Slicing an apple in wedges leaves nothing to fill.
- Keep the apples paleCut rings brown within minutes. Slice them into water acidulated with lemon juice, then drain and pat dry before arranging, or the plate will look tired by the time it reaches the table.
- Choose a firm appleA crisp, slightly tart variety such as Granny Smith, Braeburn or Honeycrisp holds a thin ring. Soft mealy apples collapse under the weight of the nut filling.
- "Stiff mayonnaise"Period books mean a thick, spoonable emulsion that will not run off the fruit, not a pourable dressing. Commercial mayonnaise is already stiff enough; if you make your own with olive oil, use a mild or light oil rather than a peppery extra-virgin, which fights the apple.
- Salted nutsWalnuts, pecans or almonds, toasted and tossed with salt while still warm. The salt is doing real work here, cutting the sweetness of both apple and mayonnaise; unsalted nuts leave the dish flat.
- Raw egg, if you make the mayonnaiseUncooked homemade mayonnaise is never heated in this recipe. Pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice for anyone serving young children, pregnant women or elderly guests.
- Assembly and yieldTwo or three rings per person on a lettuce leaf, so one medium apple serves two to three. Fill and plate within an hour of serving, refrigerated, or the lettuce wilts under the dressing.
This comes from one of the small promotional booklets that food companies issued in the early twentieth century to teach American cooks new uses for a product; it is often said to be a Pompeian olive oil booklet, and the recipes exist chiefly to argue that olive oil belongs in the household salad bowl and in homemade mayonnaise. Apple-and-nut salads were fashionable in exactly that period, the era of the ladies' luncheon, when fruit dressed with mayonnaise on a lettuce leaf counted as a salad course and the sweet-plus-mayonnaise combination raised no eyebrows at all. The style is closely related to Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s, which in its earliest form paired apple and celery with the same mayonnaise, nuts being a later addition; what distinguishes this version is that it is arranged rather than mixed, a presentation typical of a time when salads were expected to look constructed on the plate.