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Cream-Cheese Salad
6 slices canned pineapple
French dressing
1 cup cream cheese
Lettuce leaves
Purple grape-juice
Work enough grape-juice into the cream cheese to soften it so that it can be made into balls with the hands or with butter paddles. Add the grape-juice cautiously so as not to make the mixture too soft to handle. Place a slice of pineapple on a lettuce leaf, put a cheese ball on top and pour grape-juice and French dressing over all.
A composed salad of the ladies'-luncheon school, and it works if you keep the moisture under control. Everything depends on how much grape juice goes into the cheese.
- Add the juice by the teaspoonA cup of cream cheese takes surprisingly little liquid before it slumps. Work in one teaspoon at a time until the cheese is just pliable, then stop; past that point it becomes hard to roll, and chilling will only partly rescue it.
- What "cream cheese" meantAt the time the term covered any fresh, unripened soft cheese. Modern block cream cheese is stabilized with gum and will behave stiffly at first; let it come to room temperature before working it, or use Neufchâtel for a softer texture. One cup is about 8 ounces.
- Purple grape-juiceMost likely unfermented Concord juice, sweet and deeply staining, of the kind then sold in bottles as a temperance drink. It will tint the cheese lavender-pink.
- French dressing, 1900 senseA plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Drain the pineapple hardCanned rings come packed in syrup or juice. Blot them dry on a towel, or the syrup thins the dressing and pools under the lettuce.
- Butter paddlesSmall ridged wooden paddles used to shape butter into balls. Chilled hands, two spoons, or a small scoop do the same job; wet or chill the tools so the cheese releases.
- Chill before servingRoll the balls and refrigerate them 20 to 30 minutes until firm. Dress the plates at the last moment, since grape juice bleeds into lettuce quickly and the leaf goes limp.
- YieldSix salads, one pineapple ring each — a first course or a light lunch plate rather than a side.
Fruit-and-cream-cheese salads like this one belong to a distinct American moment: the years after canned Hawaiian pineapple became cheap and widely available, and after bottled unfermented grape juice — promoted heavily by temperance-minded producers from the 1890s onward — turned up in ordinary pantries. Butterick's readers were sewing-pattern customers being taught the manners of the fashionable luncheon table, where a salad was expected to be built rather than tossed, arranged on a leaf of lettuce as a sort of edible centerpiece. The combination of sweet fruit, fresh cheese and a sharp vinaigrette may strike a modern palate as odd, but it belongs to the same family as the molded and stuffed fruit salads that dominated American entertaining for the next fifty years.