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Cherry Salad
(MRS. PETERSON.) Marinate as many hazelnuts as cherries with plenty of oil, half as much lemon juice as oil, and a little salt, one or two hours. Put a nut in the place of the stone in the cherries. Sprinkle with oil and a very little lemon juice, and serve in lettuce nests.
A fruit-and-nut salad of the type that filled the lighter pages of turn-of-the-century salad books: no quantities, no yield, and an assumption that the cook owns a bottle of salad oil and a head of lettuce. The proportions given are ratios, not measures, so scale to the fruit you have.
- The hinge: pit without splittingThe whole effect depends on the cherry staying whole so the nut is hidden inside. Use a plunger-style cherry pitter through the stem end, or push the stone out with a sturdy drinking straw or a clean hairpin; a knife cut will halve the fruit and the salad becomes a bowl of loose cherries and nuts.
- What "oil" means hereUnqualified "oil" in a salad recipe of this kind most likely means the bottled salad oil of the period, usually olive, though cottonseed was also sold under that name. A mild, not peppery, oil suits the fruit better than a modern grassy extra-virgin.
- The marinade ratioTwo parts oil to one part lemon juice with a pinch of salt. The recipe asks for "plenty of oil," so use enough to cover the nuts, with half that volume of lemon juice.
- Hazelnuts need skinningThe recipe assumes prepared nuts. Toast raw hazelnuts at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes, then rub them in a rough towel to remove the bitter papery skins before they go into the oil. Skin-on nuts will make the whole salad taste tannic.
- Why marinate at allOne to two hours in oil and acid seasons the nut through, so each cherry delivers salt and lemon at the center rather than only on the surface.
- Cherries to useLarge firm sweet cherries, Bing or the paler Rainier, hold their shape around the nut. Sour pie cherries are too small and too soft for this treatment.
- Assemble lateStuffed cherries weep juice and the lettuce wilts under oil. Pit and stuff close to serving, dress lightly at the table, and use the inner cup-shaped leaves of butter or iceberg lettuce for the "nests."
- YieldA pound of cherries, very roughly 50 to 70 fruit depending on size, will fill several lettuce cups as a first course or a salad alongside cold poultry.
This belongs to a vogue for fruit salads built as small constructions rather than mixtures, associated with the turn of the century and with the domestic science movement and its ladies' luncheon menus. Stuffing a stoned cherry, date or prune with a nut was a common trick for making a plate look composed, and the lettuce "nest" was a standard presentation for fruit salads in cookery writing of the period. The attribution to Mrs. Peterson suggests a compiled or contributed collection, in which recipes were credited by name to the housekeepers and cooking teachers who supplied them.