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De John's Salad
Pare six Bartlett pears, care being taken not to remove stems. Cut in thin slices, and serve in original shapes on lettuce leaves. Serve with French Dressing.
A three-line salad that depends entirely on the fruit and the knife work. Everything worth saying is about ripeness, shape and the dressing the original assumes you already know.
- "Original shapes" is the whole trickThe recipe leaves the method to you. One workable reading: halve and core each pared pear, lay the half cut-side down, and slice thin from the blossom end toward the stem without cutting through at the stem. Slide a palette knife under it, transfer to the lettuce, and press gently so the slices fan out while the pear still reads as a pear, stem attached.
- RipenessBartletts should give slightly at the neck and smell faintly floral. Rock-hard fruit will not fan without splitting; a pear that has gone fully soft collapses into the lettuce. Buy them firm and let them sit two or three days at room temperature.
- BrowningPared pear flesh discolours within minutes and the recipe offers no defence. Brush the cut surfaces with lemon juice, or assemble immediately before the plates go out.
- French Dressing in this bookNot a sweet orange-coloured bottled dressing. Farmer's French Dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, worked in a cold bowl; the proportion given runs around two to three parts oil to one of vinegar depending on the edition, so check the book's own entry. Spoon it over at the table rather than tossing, or the fan comes apart.
- The lettuceThe recipe names no variety. A cup-shaped leaf of Boston or butterhead, cold and thoroughly dry, suits the dish; wet leaves thin the dressing and it slides off the pear.
- YieldSix pears, six plates. As written this is a first course or a salad course before dessert, not a side dish; a little cheese, blue or a fresh curd, is a natural addition though the original does not call for it.
Fruit salads dressed with plain oil and vinegar were a fashionable novelty in American cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a run of them — pear, grapefruit, banana, orange — in among the older mayonnaise-bound chicken and lobster salads. The habit of hanging a person's name on a salad was equally of the moment; who De John was is not recorded in the book, and such names often came from a hotel chef, a caterer or a friend of the author rather than from any documented origin. The Bartlett pear itself is a New England story: the variety is the English Williams' Bon Chrétien, and the American name is generally traced to Enoch Bartlett of Dorchester, Massachusetts, who propagated and distributed it in the early nineteenth century without knowing what it already was. For a Boston cookbook, it was simply the pear.