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Robin's Nest Salad
Ripe peaches Blanched hazel nuts Seeded grapes 1 pint (2 cups) whipping cream I beaten white of egg 1 teaspoonful almond extract
This entry is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was common in novelty salad books of the period; the arrangement was assumed to be obvious from the name. A few of its assumptions no longer hold.
- The raw egg white is the problemA beaten white folded into whipped cream is never heated at any point, and the finished salad is served cold and often held on a buffet. Uncooked shell egg white carries a real Salmonella risk, and the dressing is exactly the kind of cold, protein-rich mixture that gives bacteria time to multiply. Use a current recipe if you want a whipped fruit dressing.
- No method is givenThe title implies a peach half set cut-side up as the nest, filled with seeded grapes and hazelnuts as the eggs, with the cream mixture spooned over or piped around, but the original specifies none of this. Nothing in it tells you to peel the peaches, though ripe fruit slips its skin easily after a brief scald.
- Seeded grapesIn older usage "seeded" means the seeds have been removed by hand, not that the grapes were seedless to begin with. Seedless table grapes now do the same job with no work, though they are smaller than the large table grapes such a salad would have used.
- Blanched hazel nutsBlanching here means skinning: the nuts are toasted or scalded so the bitter brown papery skin rubs off, leaving a pale kernel that reads as an egg. Pre-skinned hazelnuts are sold, but they are usually raw and flavourless by comparison with ones you skin yourself.
- One pint of creamA pint is 2 cups, as the original helpfully notes, and it will whip up to roughly a quart of loose cream "sauce". For four to six servings a half cup of cream is ample; the pint suggests this was scaled for a party table.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon into two cups of cream is assertive by modern taste. Modern extract may be either a natural bitter-almond distillate or synthetic benzaldehyde; check the label if the distinction matters to you.
- ServingThe original gives no yield and no serving instruction. One peach half per person would make a single course salad in the older sense, and such salads were commonly served on lettuce as a lunch dish rather than as dessert.
"Robin's nest" belongs to a whole family of early twentieth-century American composed salads named for what they looked like rather than what was in them " candle salads, bird's nest salads " and it depends on a definition of "salad" that has almost disappeared: sweetened fruit bound with whipped cream or boiled dressing, served on a lettuce leaf as a distinct course at luncheon. Novelty books of this kind, aimed at hostesses looking for a table that would be remarked on, printed dozens of them; the ingredient list alone was considered sufficient because the assembly was the point and the cook was expected to see the picture in the title.