Peach Salad
Peel ripe peaches, remove the stones, and fill the cavities with chopped blanched almonds mixed Imported Pompeian Olive Oil is the world's finest pure olive oil. with mayonnaise made without mustard and whitened with whipped cream. Serve on lettuce and pass mayonnaise with it.
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A fruit salad in the early twentieth-century American style, where mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream stood in for a sweet dressing. The recipe gives no quantities, so the proportions are yours to set.
- Ignore the advertising lineThe sentence "Imported Pompeian Olive Oil is the world's finest pure olive oil" is a printed advertisement that has fallen into the middle of the instruction; the stray characters at the end are likewise typographic debris. Read the recipe as: peel ripe peaches, remove the stones, and fill the cavities with chopped blanched almonds mixed with mayonnaise made without mustard and whitened with whipped cream; serve on lettuce and pass mayonnaise with it.
- The dressing is the hingeMayonnaise appears twice: mixed with the almonds as a filling that has to hold in the peach hollow, and passed separately at the table. Fold the whipped cream in by hand at the last moment -- about one part softly whipped cream to three parts mayonnaise is a workable starting point -- since too much cream will loosen the filling. The recipe specifies no proportions.
- Mayonnaise without mustardThe recipe simply says the mayonnaise is made without mustard; no reason is given, though the likely one is that its sharpness would fight the fruit. If you are using a jarred mayonnaise, choose a plain one rather than a Dijon-style or salad-dressing type, and add a pinch of salt and a few drops of lemon to compensate for the cream.
- Raw eggMayonnaise made from scratch here is never cooked and is served to the table as is. Use pasteurized eggs, keep the bowl and the finished salad refrigerated, and assemble close to serving.
- Choosing peachesFreestone peaches, ripe but still firm, halve and stone cleanly; clingstones will tear. Blanch them 30 to 40 seconds in boiling water and the skins slip off with a thumb.
- BrowningPeeled peaches discolour within minutes. Brush the cut surfaces with lemon juice, or hold the halves in acidulated water and drain them well before filling.
- Blanched almondsWhole raw almonds dropped in boiling water for a minute shed their skins between finger and thumb. Dry and chop them coarsely; sliced or slivered packaged almonds work but give a flatter texture.
- Yield and servingFigure one peach, halved, per person, with a leaf or two of crisp lettuce underneath. Serve cold, on chilled plates, as a first course or alongside cold chicken or ham.
Recipe pamphlets issued by the Pompeian Olive Oil Company of Baltimore were part of a long American campaign to sell imported olive oil to households that thought of it as a druggist's item rather than a food, and the booklets lean heavily on mayonnaise and salad dressing as the argument for keeping a bottle in the kitchen. The dish itself belongs to a genre that flourished from roughly the 1890s through the 1930s: fruit set on a lettuce leaf and dressed with mayonnaise, often softened with whipped cream, a combination sometimes called mayonnaise chantilly. It looks strange now, but it followed from the period's logic that a salad course meant something cold, composed and dressed, whether the components were vegetable or fruit; the whipped cream simply tilted a savoury sauce far enough toward sweetness to sit beside a peach.