Pear Salad
Wipe, pare, and cut pears in eighths lengthwise; then remove seeds. Arrange on lettuce leaves, pour over French dressing, and garnish with ribbons of red pepper. See Canned Red Peppers p. 581.
A three-line salad that depends almost entirely on the ripeness of the fruit and the sharpness of the dressing.
- Pear choiceBartlett was the standard American pear in Farmer's day and still works; a firmer variety such as Anjou holds its shape better once cut. The fruit should yield slightly at the neck — a rock-hard pear has no perfume and a mealy one collapses into the dressing.
- "Wipe, pare"Wipe means rub the fruit clean with a damp cloth rather than wash and soak it; pare means peel.
- BrowningCut pears oxidize within minutes. Toss the eighths in a little lemon juice, or in some of the French dressing, as you cut them and assemble at the last moment.
- French dressingIn this book that means an oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine — not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name now suggests in America. Keep it tart; the fruit brings all the sweetness needed.
- Ribbons of red pepperThe cross-reference is to canned sweet red peppers, cut into thin strips. Jarred piquillo or roasted red peppers, blotted dry, are the direct modern equivalent; raw red bell pepper cut fine will do but is crunchier and less sweet.
- LettuceThe direction is simply to arrange the fruit on lettuce leaves, which suggests whole leaves as a base rather than shredded greens. Butter or Bibb lettuce gives the same effect with more flavor.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; figure roughly one pear per person as a first course or side salad.
- Worth addingA crumble of blue cheese or a few toasted walnuts is not in the original but sits naturally with pear and vinaigrette.
Fruit salads dressed with oil and vinegar were a fashionable novelty in American cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, when the salad course itself was still expanding from plain greens into an enormous catalogue of combinations — Fannie Farmer's chapter runs through everything from cabbage to grapefruit to canned peppers. The garnish here is the tell: canned sweet red peppers gave cooks a splash of color in winter when no fresh pepper was to be had, and the book devotes a separate page to putting them up. The instruction to cut in eighths lengthwise and arrange them reflects the period's interest in the appearance of a dish as much as its taste, a preoccupation the Boston Cooking School shared with the ladies' magazines it competed with.