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Turquoise Salad, No. 2 (Use pineapple in the place)
Use pineapple in the place of the apple; serve in a mound on a bed of lettuce leaves. Garnish with stars cut from the pimentos with French cutter, curled celery, and heart leaves of celery.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes the preceding Turquoise Salad, in which the apple is diced and dressed, and asks only that pineapple be substituted. The notes below cover the parts that need translating.
- Read the parent recipe firstEverything except the fruit — proportions, the other ingredients, the dressing — comes from Turquoise Salad No. 1. Without it this entry gives you a garnish scheme and nothing else.
- Drain the pineapple hardDiced pineapple sheds a great deal of juice, and if the parent recipe dresses the fruit with mayonnaise that juice will thin it into a puddle at the base of the mound. Drain it in a sieve for fifteen minutes, then blot on a towel, and dress it only at the moment of serving.
- Fresh versus cannedCanned pineapple in this period meant sweetened packed fruit, which is a plausible reading of the author's intent, though the recipe does not specify. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will not harm a mayonnaise but will soften the fruit and make any gelatine-set version refuse to set.
- PimentosCanned or jarred sweet red peppers, skinned and packed whole — not chilli peppers, and not paprika. Pat them dry and lay them flat before cutting or they tear.
- French cutterA set of small tinned-steel canapé or vegetable cutters in fancy shapes. Any small aspic or cookie cutter does the same job; a star of about half an inch reads best against the mound.
- Curled celeryCut tender stalks into two-inch lengths, slit each end into narrow fingers most of the way down, and drop them into ice water for an hour. The strips curl back on themselves. This is decoration, and it goes limp within the hour once dressed.
The book belongs to the moment when the American salad stopped being a dish of dressed greens and became a composed, moulded, garnished construction — fruit, nuts, celery and mayonnaise heaped on lettuce and finished with cut shapes. The apple-and-celery formula behind the parent recipe is of a piece with the Waldorf salad, generally traced to Oscar Tschirky at the Waldorf in the mid-1890s. Canned pineapple and canned pimentos were both becoming commercially available in this period, the pimentos prized less for flavour than for colour: a reliable scarlet that could be cut into stars, crescents and rings. Much of the labour in the recipe goes into things the diner looks at rather than tastes.