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Brazilian Salad
Remove skin and seeds from white grapes and cut in halves lengthwise. Add an equal quantity of shredded fresh pineapple, apples pared, cored, and cut in small pieces, and celery cut in small pieces; then add one-fourth the quantity of Brazil nuts broken in pieces. Mix thoroughly, and season with lemon juice. Moisten with Cream Mayonnaise Dressing (see p. 327).
A fruit-and-celery salad from the era when mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream was the standard dressing for anything sweet. The proportions are given by ratio rather than measure, which makes it easy to scale.
- The ratios, spelled outEqual parts grapes, shredded fresh pineapple, diced apple and diced celery, plus Brazil nuts at one quarter that quantity. Note that the original leaves it unclear whether the equal and quarter measures apply to each ingredient or to the total, so scale by eye.
- GrapesThe instruction to skin and seed reflects the seeded white table grapes of the period. Modern seedless green grapes need only halving lengthwise; skinning them gains nothing but lost time.
- Fresh pineapple matters hereCanned pineapple has been heat-treated and tends to go limp and syrupy in a salad like this. Use fresh, and shred it as the recipe asks rather than cubing it.
- Dress at the last minuteBromelain in raw pineapple breaks down proteins, so a cream dressing left sitting on this salad can thin and turn faintly bitter. Mix the fruit, chill it, and fold in the dressing just before it goes to the table.
- Brazil nutsBuy them shelled, and break them by hand or with the flat of a knife rather than chopping fine — flossy shards go soft. A few minutes in a 350F oven sharpens their flavor, which is otherwise mild and slightly waxy.
- Lemon juice does double dutyIt seasons, and it keeps the pared apple from browning. Toss the apple in lemon juice as you cut it, before the other fruit goes in.
- Cream Mayonnaise DressingThe book's version is mayonnaise with whipped cream folded into it; see p. 327 for the proportions. If you are making the mayonnaise from scratch and serving anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized eggs.
- ServingSalads of this kind were often served in a cup of lettuce or a hollowed half pineapple. A bed of crisp lettuce leaves on individual plates is closest to what the book intends.
The name reflects nothing Brazilian beyond the nuts: American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s sometimes seem to have taken a country's name from a single conspicuous ingredient, and Brazil nuts — shipped in quantity from the Amazon through the late nineteenth century and sold loose from barrels at Christmas — were exotic enough to carry a whole dish's title. The salad itself belongs squarely to the American fruit-salad vogue that Fannie Farmer's book helped standardize, in which sweet fruit, celery for crunch, nuts, and mayonnaise slackened with whipped cream were assembled in endless permutations; the better-known Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in the 1890s, is the same formula with fewer variables. Fresh pineapple appearing as a matter of course is itself a marker of the period: steamship traffic from Cuba and the Caribbean had by then made it a reliable, if still slightly showy, item on a Boston grocer's list.