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Alligator-Pear Salad
2 alligator pears
½ to ¾ cup mayonnaise or
Lettuce leaves
French dressing
Alligator pears, or avocadoes, are to be had at fancy fruiterers. Cut each pear into six pieces, giving wedge-shaped sections, and if these are too large, cut each section again lengthwise. Peel and arrange wedges of pears on beds of lettuce leaves. Either French dressing or mayonnaise may be used, but the fruit is rich, therefore the French dressing is preferred by many people.
A minimal recipe that survives intact; the only real work is buying and cutting the fruit. Everything below is about ripeness, browning and proportion.
- Alligator pear means avocadoThe name was standard American usage into the 1920s, and is usually explained as an English reshaping of the Spanish 'aguacate', perhaps helped along by the fruit's rough dark skin. The recipe's aside that they are "to be had at fancy fruiterers" suggests a period when avocados were still a specialty import rather than a supermarket staple.
- Which avocadoThe fruit of the period was more likely a large, smooth green-skinned West Indian type, watery beside the Hass that now dominates. Hass works and is richer; being smaller, you may want three or four where the book calls for two.
- Ripeness is the whole dishThe fruit should yield to gentle pressure at the stem end but not feel hollow or stringy. An underripe avocado cannot be cut into clean wedges, and an overripe one collapses on the lettuce. Ripen at room temperature in a paper bag, then refrigerate up to two days.
- Peel after cutting, as writtenThe instruction to cut into sections first and peel after is the right order. Halve lengthwise, remove the pit, quarter or sixth each half, then slip the skin off each wedge with your thumb; this loses far less flesh than peeling a whole fruit.
- BrowningCut flesh discolors within about fifteen minutes. Brush the wedges with lemon or lime juice as you go and assemble at the last moment; the acid in French dressing helps once the salad is dressed but does nothing before.
- French dressing hereIn this period French dressing means a plain shaken vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled product. Roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar. The book's point stands: the fruit is fatty, and acid suits it better than more fat.
- YieldThe book gives no serving count; two avocados at six wedges each will stretch to about four plates as a first course or side salad. Half to three-quarters of a cup of mayonnaise is generous by current taste; two tablespoons of vinaigrette per plate is plenty.
Avocados reached American tables slowly. Native to Mesoamerica and long cultivated there, they were grown in Florida and California by the late nineteenth century but remained expensive and unfamiliar enough that a household book of this era had to explain where to buy them and offer "avocadoes" as a gloss on the older name. The word avocado is generally traced to the Nahuatl ahuacatl by way of Spanish; "alligator pear" was the English folk rendering, and the two names competed in American print for decades before the growers' preference for avocado won out. That this appears in the salad chapter is itself telling: here the fruit is served raw, sliced or wedged on lettuce with a dressing.