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Hungarian Salad
Mix equal parts shredded fresh pineapple, bananas cut in pieces, and sections of tangerins, and marinate with French dressing. Fill banana skins with mixture, sprinkle generously with paprika, and arrange on lettuce leaves.
A fruit salad in the American Gilded Age idiom: sweet fruit dressed with oil and vinegar and served in its own skin. Two things decide whether it works — the dressing and the timing.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn cookbooks of this period French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, commonly around two parts oil to one of vinegar. The sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today is a later American product and will make the dish cloying.
- Dress at the last minuteMarinate is misleading here. Cut fruit standing in acid and salt weeps and goes limp quickly, and banana in particular turns to mush. Toss the fruit with the dressing and plate promptly.
- Banana browningCut bananas last and coat them in the dressing at once; the vinegar slows discoloration. Any exposed surface left standing will grey.
- Preparing the skinsSplit each banana lengthwise along one seam, lift the fruit out whole, and keep the skin as a boat. Trim a thin slice from the underside so it sits level, or bed it on the lettuce to stop it rolling.
- Tangerines"Tangerins" is period spelling for tangerine. Peel the sections and strip the loose membrane where you can — the white pith is bitter against the oil. Clementines or mandarins are the practical substitute.
- Fresh pineappleShredded here most likely means torn or coarsely grated rather than cubed, so the fibres carry the dressing. Fresh is worth insisting on; canned pineapple is already soft and usually packed in syrup or juice.
- PaprikaSweet Hungarian paprika, not hot and not smoked. It is the whole justification for the name, so use enough to colour the surface visibly.
- YieldOne filled skin per person. A small pineapple with four bananas and four tangerines will fill four skins, so buy a spare banana or two against skins that tear.
Fruit salads dressed with oil and vinegar and served on lettuce were a fixture of the American salad course from the 1890s through the 1920s, when the salad was still understood as a dressed cold dish rather than a bowl of greens. Names like Hungarian in such recipes are often taken to signal paprika and little more — a national label borrowed for a single spice, in the same way a dish became "Creole" for tomato or "Indienne" for curry powder. Fannie Farmer's revisions of *The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book* made use of tropical fruit, and serving the salad in the banana skin belongs to the same era's fondness for edible containers, alongside tomato cases, orange baskets and green pepper cups.