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Alligator Pear Salad
Alligator pears are to be had at fancy fruiterers and one pear may be made to serve in three portions. Peel the pear, quarter and core it, and, if large, divide each quarter into fourths. This will give sixteen wedge-shaped pieces. Place on a bed made of hearts of lettuce and serve with either mayonnaise or French dressing.
A plain composed salad from a period when the avocado was still a novelty item sold by the piece. Almost nothing needs changing except the vocabulary and a word about ripeness.
- Alligator pear is avocadoThe name is usually linked to the pebbled, dark green skin of some varieties. Much of the fruit reaching northern markets in this period was a large, thin-skinned Florida or West Indian type; the pebbly Hass now standard in supermarkets is smaller and richer, so one fruit may stretch only to two portions rather than the three the recipe promises.
- "Core it" means remove the pitThere is no core in the apple sense. Halve the fruit lengthwise around the single large stone, twist the halves apart, lift the stone out, then quarter and peel.
- Ripeness is the whole recipeSince nothing is cooked, seasoned or mashed, an underripe avocado has nowhere to hide. The fruit should yield to gentle pressure at the stem end and the peel should strip away with a knife tip or thumb rather than needing to be pared.
- Cut last, dress immediatelyCut surfaces brown within minutes. Slice just before serving and coat the wedges with the dressing, or squeeze a little lemon or lime juice over them; the acid in either dressing does the same work.
- French dressing, 1911 senseNot the sweet orange bottled product. It means oil and vinegar beaten together with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. The oil-based dressings suit the fruit better than mayonnaise, which doubles the richness.
- Hearts of lettuceThe pale inner leaves of a head lettuce, a crisphead or butterhead type. Any crisp, mild leaf serves; the point is a firm base that will not collapse under the wedges.
- YieldSixteen wedges, but only from a large fruit, which the recipe divides among three portions.
When the Butterick Cook Book appeared in the early 1910s, the avocado was an expensive curiosity in the northern United States, which is why the recipe opens by telling readers where to buy one and how far it can be stretched. Commercial groves in Florida and southern California were only just being established, and the fruit traveled north as a luxury item for "fancy fruiterers." The name alligator pear is generally traced to an English mangling of the Spanish aguacate, itself from the Nahuatl ahuacatl, reinforced by the reptilian look of the skin; American growers later pushed the word avocado, and it is often said that the older name was thought to put shoppers off. The treatment here, raw wedges on lettuce with a dressing, reflects the era's fashion for the fruit salad as a light, genteel course.