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Supper Fruit Salad Combinations
1--Equal parts of diced apple, celery and seeded grapes and a few chopped nut meats, and Whipped Cream Mayonnaise to moisten. Serve on lettuce. 2-Alternating slices of fresh peach and pear, served on lettuce with Whipped Cream Mayonnaise, to which a little candied ginger or a few chopped nut meats have been added . 3-Equal parts of diced canteloupe and watermelon with quartered fresh plums and a little diced apple. Put together with Mazola Mayonnaise and serve with a garnish of lettuce. 4-Equal parts of stoned red cherries, fresh or canned diced pineapple and sections of orange put together with Whipped Cream Mayonnaise. Garnish with lettuce and a few filberts if desired.
Four assembly formulas rather than four recipes, and they hold up as written. The only things needing translation are the dressing and a couple of old ingredient names.
- Whipped Cream MayonnaisePlain mayonnaise lightened with unsweetened whipped cream folded in shortly before serving; period recipes vary in the proportion of cream. It is what makes the salads read as supper food rather than dessert, and it slackens as it stands, so mix it close to serving time.
- Mazola MayonnaiseSimply mayonnaise made with Mazola corn oil, the brand this book was written to promote. Any neutral-oil mayonnaise gives the same result, and a commercial jar is fine here.
- FilbertsHazelnuts. The original does not call for toasting, but blanching and lightly toasting them (roughly ten minutes in a moderate oven) suits any of the "chopped nut meats" in these four.
- Apple browningNothing in the original guards against oxidation. Dice the apple last, or toss it in a little lemon juice, or the first and third combinations will look grey by the time they reach the table.
- Seeded grapesIn period cookbook usage "seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that the grapes contain them. Seedless grapes, halved, save the work entirely.
- CeleryCut it fine and from the inner ribs. Outer stalks are stringy and will dominate the apple and grapes rather than balancing them.
- Melon and cherriesBoth shed liquid. Drain diced melon in a sieve for a few minutes and pat stoned cherries dry, or the dressing thins into a pink puddle.
This page comes from one of the corn-products cookbooks of the early twentieth century, which is why Mazola oil appears by name in the middle of a fruit salad. Those books were distributed to sell a then-novel ingredient, cooking oil pressed from corn, and their recipe lists lean hard on the dishes that showed it off: mayonnaise above all. Fruit-and-mayonnaise salads on a lettuce leaf were a fixture of American light suppers and ladies' luncheons from the 1900s through the 1950s, the ancestor of the marshmallow-and-whipped-topping salads that followed. The combination of apple, celery, grapes and nuts in the first variation is the Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s, where the original was said to be only apple, celery and mayonnaise, with nuts added later. Candied ginger, offered as an alternative to chopped nut meats, and filberts, marked "if desired," mark the recipe as aiming a little above everyday cooking.