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Pineapple and Nut Salad in Tomato Baskets
Mix one cup of shredded pineapple, either fresh or canned, with one cup of coarsely cut nut meats, and stand in French dressing on the ice. Peel, cut off all the top of the tomato except a strip to form a bail, scoop out the center, and fill with the pineapple and nuts. Place one dessertspoon of mayonnaise on top of each basket. This salad requires a liberal amount of salt.
A composed salad from the era when the tomato was carved into a serving vessel. The construction is the whole point, so choose fruit that can take it.
- "Stand in French dressing on the ice"This means chill, in the dressing, before filling; "the ice" is the ice-cooled refrigerator of the period. Half an hour or so is enough — left much longer, the pineapple gives up juice into the dressing.
- French dressing, 1911 senseFrench dressing, period sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled dressing, which is later. It means a plain vinaigrette: broadly three parts oil to one of vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken. Use only a few tablespoons here — it is a marinade, not a pool.
- DessertspoonBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about two teaspoons. A generous teaspoon of mayonnaise per basket is the intent.
- The bailThe "bail" is the handle of a pail. You are cutting away the top of the tomato but leaving a narrow arch of skin and flesh spanning it. Cut it a little thicker than looks necessary; it tears easily once the tomato is hollowed and the shell softens as it sits.
- Peeling the tomatoesDip them in boiling water for 15 to 20 seconds, then into cold water, and the skins slip off. Do not leave them in the boiling water longer or the flesh under the skin cooks and the shell collapses under the filling.
- Drain the pineapple hardCanned pineapple in syrup will make the dressing cloyingly sweet and thin the mayonnaise. Drain it, blot it, and if you are using fresh, drain that too — it releases a surprising amount of juice once shredded.
- The nutsThe recipe says only "nut meats"; walnuts, pecans and blanched almonds are the ones that turn up most often in salads of this kind. Toasting them lightly is not in the original but keeps them from going soft against the wet fruit.
- The salt note is not a throwawayPineapple, nuts and tomato are all mild and sweet-sour; without firm seasoning the whole thing reads as fruit cup. Salt the tomato shells from the inside as well as salting the dressing.
- Yield and serviceA cup each of pineapple and nuts fills four to six medium tomatoes. Serve on a lettuce leaf, cold, and assemble no more than an hour ahead.
This belongs to the great age of the American "salad" as an architectural exercise, roughly 1890 to 1930, when a salad's merit lay as much in its presentation as its flavor — fruit and nuts bound with mayonnaise, served in a hollowed tomato, pepper, apple or orange shell. The Butterick company came to cookbooks by way of dress patterns and women's magazines, and the household audience it addressed was expected to produce something that looked composed on the plate for a luncheon or a ladies' card party, where cold salads and mayonnaise did nearly all the work. Canned pineapple, which the recipe treats as interchangeable with fresh, had become cheap and widely available in the years after Hawaiian commercial canning scaled up in the early 1900s, and it turns up constantly in salads of this period. The pairing of sweet fruit with mayonnaise, which reads oddly now, was then simply what a salad was: the Waldorf, generally dated to the 1890s at the Waldorf hotel in New York, fixed the pattern of apple and mayonnaise that dozens of variations like this one followed — the nuts now taken for granted in it were a later addition.