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Fruit Salad Combinations
1-Allow three cooked figs to a person. Arrange in nests of lettuce, top with Cream Mayonnaise and sprinkle thickly with desiccated cocoanut. 2-To each person allow a banana, peeled and split lengthwise. Arrange individually on salad plates.
Put stoned dates cut in halves, lengthwise, on each piece of banana, garnish with Cream Mayonnaise, chopped nut meats and lettuce. 3-Combine one cup orange sections, one cup halved, stoned prunes, one-half cup diced celery and one-half cup sliced bananas with French Dressing for fruit salads. Serve on lettuce with Cream Mayonnaise.
Three luncheon salads sketched in shorthand, on the assumption that the cook already has Cream Mayonnaise and French Dressing standing by. The proportions are per person for the first two and by the cup for the third.
- Cream MayonnaiseNot a product but a standard preparation of the period: plain mayonnaise folded with whipped cream, commonly in equal or half quantity, sometimes with a little lemon. It is generally pale and soft, and because such a dressing slackens, make it close to serving time.
- French Dressing for fruit saladsThe book's fruit version rather than the savoury one; fruit dressings of the period were typically oil with lemon or a mild vinegar, lightly sweetened. A neutral oil suits the prunes and oranges better than a strong olive oil.
- Cooked figsMost likely dried figs stewed until plump in water or a light syrup, then cooled and drained, rather than fresh. Three per person is generous; drain them thoroughly or the mayonnaise slides off.
- Desiccated cocoanutUnsweetened dried shredded coconut, finer and drier than modern sweetened flake. Sweetened bagged coconut will push the whole plate into dessert territory; look for unsweetened desiccated.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseNothing on these plates is cooked after the dressing goes on. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise lightened with cream.
- Keeping the bananasSplit bananas brown within minutes. Cut them last, brush the cut faces with the lemon-based French dressing, and assemble at the plate rather than in advance.
- Yield of the third saladRoughly three cups of fruit and celery, which serves four as a luncheon salad on lettuce. Dress it lightly and toss just before plating so the prunes do not stain the orange.
- LettuceA "nest" means cupped leaves from a head lettuce, iceberg or butterhead, chilled and dried. Loose-leaf mixes collapse under the weight of figs and cream dressing.
The sweet fruit salad bound with mayonnaise is one of the most distinctive habits of American cooking between roughly 1890 and the 1950s, and the luncheon table is where it lived. Mayonnaise thinned with whipped cream, often called cream or fruit mayonnaise, was a common dressing for anything with apple, banana, orange or dates in it, and the lettuce nest was the usual presentation, a cool green cup that let a soft dressing sit without spreading across the plate. The ingredients here are telling: dried figs, dates, prunes and desiccated coconut were pantry goods that travelled and kept, while the bananas and oranges reflect the fruit trade that had made both cheap and year-round in American cities by the early twentieth century. Celery, appearing among the fruit in the third combination, was a fashionable salad vegetable of the era and is doing the same job it does in Waldorf salad, supplying crunch and salt against the sweetness.