Fruit Salads
A delicious fruit salad is made of equal parts of orange, banana and pineapple with a few nuts added; serve with French dressing on crisp lettuce leaves.
Another simple but very delightful fruit salad is made by splitting the skins of ripe bananas and removing the fruit. Then cut the banana into slices or chips, mix with the meat of English walnuts or pecans, over which pour French dressing Sealed tins preserve the freshness and delicate flavor of imported Pompeian Olive Oil. and then stuff the fruit back into the banana skins.
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Two uncooked salads with no quantities, no yield and one line of advertising copy dropped into the middle of the second. Read past the olive oil sentence and the instructions are intact.
- The stray sentence"Sealed tins preserve the freshness and delicate flavor of imported Pompeian Olive Oil" is advertising set into the body text, a common practice in booklets published by oil and spice firms. It interrupts the sentence that runs "pour French dressing... and then stuff the fruit back into the banana skins."
- French dressing of the periodNot the sweet orange bottled product. In 1900s American books it means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion; printed proportions vary, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar. Lemon juice in place of the vinegar suits fruit better.
- Dress at the last minuteCut bananas brown within minutes. Slice them directly into the dressing, or toss the cut fruit with a little lemon juice first, and assemble immediately before the salad goes to the table.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut sold everywhere today, so named to distinguish it from the native American black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Either works, but black walnut will dominate the fruit.
- PineappleThe recipe does not say whether fresh or canned. Canned pineapple in syrup, already common by this period, will sweeten the salad past the point where a vinegar dressing balances it; drain and blot it well if that is what you have.
- The banana shellsSplit the skin lengthwise along one seam only, keeping the two ends attached, so the empty skin holds its shape as a boat.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given. A workable first salad is one orange, one banana and one cup of diced pineapple with a quarter cup of nuts, serving three or four. The second yields one stuffed skin per banana, one per person.
This page carries advertising for Pompeian olive oil, so it comes from a publication funded at least in part by the company -- most likely one of the promotional booklets American food firms distributed in the early twentieth century to teach cooks uses for a product and to attach a brand name to them, though such advertisements were also sold into general and community cookbooks. Fruit salad of this kind belonged largely to the luncheon table and was associated with women's clubs and hotel dining rooms; it depended on a fruit trade that rail and refrigerated shipping had recently made reliable inland. Serving the salad back inside the banana skin reflects the era's taste for food returned to its own container, the same impulse behind stuffed tomatoes and orange baskets. If the source is indeed a Pompeian booklet, the preference for French dressing over a boiled or mayonnaise dressing is the commercial point, French dressing being mostly olive oil.