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Combination Fruit Salad
6 halves of stewed pears, fresh 36 white cherries or canned
Boiled dressing
Lettuce leaves
Place the half pears on crisp lettuce leaves. Stone the cherries and arrange them around the pears. Serve with a boiled dressing.
A plate-assembly salad of the sort that filled the fruit-salad pages of American cookbooks around 1900. The only real work is the dressing, which the recipe does not give.
- Boiled dressingThis is the period's standard cooked salad dressing: egg yolks, a little flour or cornstarch, sugar, mustard, salt, vinegar and milk or cream, thickened over hot water and cooled. It is tangy and custard-like rather than oily, and it must be made ahead and chilled. A modern cook can substitute a thin honey-yogurt or a lightly sweetened crème fraîche, though the flavour will be softer.
- Stewed pearsHalved, peeled and cored pears poached in light sugar syrup until just tender, then cooled in the syrup. Firm Bosc or Anjou hold their shape; ripe Bartletts collapse. Drain and blot them or the dressing will slide off.
- White cherriesMeaning pale-yellow-blushed sweet cherries, Rainier or the older Napoleon/Royal Ann type. Their pale flesh has the practical advantage of not staining the dressing. Dark Bings work but will bleed pink.
- If using cannedCanned cherries of the period were usually packed in sugar syrup. Drain well and rinse briefly, or the salad turns cloying against an already sweetened dressing.
- StoningThirty-six cherries is a fair amount of pitting. A hand pitter keeps them whole; a paperclip or piping tip pushed through the stem end works if the fruit is firm.
- Lettuce"Crisp" means a cup-shaped leaf that holds the fruit: iceberg or butterhead cups, chilled and thoroughly dried. Modern soft leaf mixes will wilt under the dressing.
- YieldSix half pears with six cherries apiece serves six as a first course or a light luncheon salad. Dress at the table or immediately before serving.
Fruit salads dressed with cooked mayonnaise-style sauces were a fixture of American middle-class entertaining from the 1890s through the 1920s. Boiled dressing predates commercially bottled mayonnaise and was the practical choice in kitchens without reliable refrigeration or a steady supply of good salad oil: it uses eggs and a starch thickener, keeps a few days in a cool larder, and its vinegar sharpness was thought to cut the sweetness of preserved fruit. The instruction "or canned" is the telling detail. Commercially canned white cherries and pears were widely available, and a recipe like this let a hostess set down a composed, symmetrical salad in February. The arrangement itself, pale fruit on green leaves with a white dressing, reflects the era's taste for salads that were looked at as much as eaten.