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Nut Salad Sundae
Chop 1 pound of mixed nuts and add 10 ounces crushed strawberry and 10 ounces crushed pineapple sauce. Pour over plain ice cream.
A soda-fountain topping rather than a dish in its own right: the whole recipe is a bowl of nuts folded into two sweetened fruit packs and spooned over vanilla. The proportions are trade proportions, meant for a day's service at the counter.
- What "crushed strawberry" and "crushed pineapple sauce" wereBoth were commercial fountain fruits — fruit crushed and held in heavy sugar syrup, sold by the gallon to soda dispensers. The nearest modern equivalents are a good preserve thinned slightly with syrup, or fresh fruit crushed with sugar and left to macerate an hour until it gives up juice.
- Ounces here are weight, not volumeOunces here are probably weight, not volume -- the recipe does not say which, though fountain formulas of this kind were often weighed. Read as weights, 10 ounces of crushed fruit is roughly a generous cup and a quarter of each, and the finished mix runs about 1 pound of nuts to 1 pound 4 ounces of fruit.
- "Mixed nuts" in 1900"Mixed nuts" -- would most likely have meant some combination of walnuts, pecans, almonds, filberts and Brazil nuts. Chop them coarse, not fine, or they disappear into the syrup. Toasting them ten minutes at 350F and cooling them before mixing is not in the original but keeps them from going soft.
- Mix nuts in at the last momentThis is the hinge. Nuts sitting in fruit syrup lose their crispness within a few hours; hold the fruit and the nuts separately and combine only what you will serve.
- "Plain ice cream" means vanillaIn fountain usage plain ice cream was unflavoured or lightly vanilla-flavoured cream, the neutral base against which a topping was judged. Vanilla is the right choice.
American soda books of this period were manuals for a trade, not for the home: a dispenser behind a marble counter needed formulas in pounds and ounces that could be batched in the morning and ladled all day. The sundae itself is generally traced to the 1880s and 90s, when Sunday restrictions on soda water in several towns pushed fountains toward ice cream served with syrup and no carbonation, though the exact origin is claimed by more than one place and none of the claims is firmly documented. The word "salad" here has nothing to do with greens — around 1900 it was applied loosely to any mixture of chopped fruit and nuts, as in the fruit salads and nut salads of the same decade. Nuts were a mark of expense: shelled walnuts and pecans were sold by weight.