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Pineapple Salad
Peel a couple of very ripe pineapples cutting out the eyes; shred thoroughly, throwing away the core. Place the shredded fruit in a compote-dish; then mix half a pint of white-sugar syrup and a tablespoonful each of brandy and curacoa; pour this mixture over the fruit, and serve.
A macerated fruit dish rather than a salad in the leafy sense, and it stands or falls on the pineapple. Buy fruit that smells sweet at the base and gives slightly when pressed; underripe pineapple is acidic and fibrous and no amount of syrup will fix it.
- Half a pint of syrupThat is one US cup. The recipe does not specify proportions; a plain sugar syrup (sugar and water heated until clear, then cooled) is what is meant, and period syrups ranged from thin to fairly heavy. A cup of syrup for two pineapples is generous — start with half and add to taste, since ripe fruit brings its own sugar.
- Shred, not diceShredding here means tearing or scraping the flesh into coarse strands rather than cutting neat cubes, which releases more juice. A fork dragged down a peeled quarter does it well.
- The core and eyesBoth are genuinely tough and are discarded for texture, not flavour. The core can be simmered into the syrup and strained out if you want a little more pineapple character.
- CuracoaCuraçao, the orange-peel liqueur. Any decent dry orange liqueur stands in. A tablespoon each of brandy and curaçao across two pineapples is a background note, not a spiked dessert.
- Compote-dishA footed glass or silver bowl used for dressed fruit at the close of a meal. Any wide shallow serving bowl works; glass shows the fruit off, which was the point.
- Let it sit"Serve" immediately gives you fruit sitting in syrup. Thirty minutes to an hour chilled lets the syrup and liqueur draw juice out of the strands and pull the whole thing together.
- Fresh pineapple and dairyRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein. Left in contact with whipped cream or a custard it can turn them thin and develop a bitter edge, and it will keep gelatin from setting. Serve it plain or with a crisp biscuit.
- YieldTwo pineapples shredded make roughly six to eight small servings as a dessert or a between-course refresher.
Pineapple carried an air of luxury in the Waldorf's early years — grown under glass in Europe and shipped north from the Caribbean and Florida by steamer and rail — though by the 1890s improved shipping had made it a good deal less rare than it once was. Dishes like this sat in the gap between dessert and salad in Gilded Age service, where "salad" could mean any dressed cold thing; the best-known salad associated with the hotel is the apple-and-celery Waldorf salad credited to Oscar Tschirky, its maître d'hôtel. The brandy-and-curaçao dressing is the same gesture found in the era's fruit cups and coupes: a spoonful of spirit standing in for a sauce.