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Salad, Buenos Ayres
Peel and cut in quarters a large alligator pear, then finely slice and place in a salad bowl; cut in quarters, peel and core a good-sized sound apple; finely slice a medium, sound green pepper; peel and finely slice a medium ripe cucumber. Carefully crack twenty-four walnuts, free them from all fibres, divide in sections, then add all these articles to bowl and mix well. Season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A raw salad that needs no cooking, only a little care in the order of assembly and a clear idea of what the old names mean.
- Alligator pearThis is an avocado. One large fruit, ripe enough to yield to gentle pressure but not soft, gives roughly the volume the recipe expects. The recipe starts with it; if you prefer, cut it last so it spends as little time as possible in the air.
- Twenty-four walnutsWhole nuts in the shell, which crack out to about 1 to 1¼ cups of halves, or 4 to 5 oz. Shelled walnuts sold today are largely free of the papery fibre the recipe tells you to pick away, though bits of membrane often remain; they also turn rancid faster, so taste one before committing the batch.
- Green pepperA bell pepper, not a chile. In American cookbooks of this period "green pepper" generally meant the sweet kind, and heat here would fight the avocado.
- The dressingThe recipe says only "dressing", which in this context means the plain oil-and-vinegar sort with salt and pepper; something near three parts oil to one of vinegar is the usual reading. Four tablespoons is a light coating rather than a soaking, which is right for this much soft fruit.
- CucumberCucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned and seedier than the common supermarket varieties. Peel as directed; halve and scrape the seeds out if the cucumber is large and watery, or the dressing will thin on the plate.
- BrowningNothing here is acidulated until the dressing goes on, so dress and serve immediately. A squeeze of lemon over the apple and avocado as you cut them holds the colour without changing the flavour much.
- YieldServes about four as a first course, or two or three as a light lunch salad.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose International Cook Book gathered several thousand dishes under national and city names. The "Buenos Ayres" label is of the loose kind common in that genre: it signals South America by way of the avocado, which American cooks of the period still called the alligator pear, a name often traced to the pebbled dark skin of some varieties, though at least as often to a corruption of the Spanish aguacate. Avocados were an expensive novelty in the eastern United States in the 1910s, imported and sold by the piece, which is why they turn up in restaurant salads and hotel menus long before they reach ordinary home kitchens. The combination of fruit, nut and raw vegetable under a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing was itself fashionable at the time, and this salad belongs to that vogue as much as to any Argentine table.