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Pineapple Salad Sandwich
Shred one medium sized pineapple, add one cupful of skinned and seeded white grapes, one-half cup of finely chopped English walnuts; moisten with cream mayonnaise. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread with a crisp lettuce leaf between. Garnish with a red cherry.
A sandwich filling in the fruit-salad idiom that dominated American tea tables around 1900. It comes together in minutes, but the pineapple has to be handled properly or the filling floods the bread.
- Drain the pineapple hardFresh shredded pineapple sheds a great deal of juice. Let it sit in a sieve for 15-20 minutes and press gently before mixing, or the dressing thins and the bread turns to paste within the hour.
- Bromelain and the dressingRaw pineapple carries bromelain, a protease that gives a slight tingle on the tongue and can work on the proteins in an egg- or cream-based dressing if the filling stands. Safer to mix shortly before serving than to hold it; canned pineapple, which is heat-treated, does not have this problem.
- "Cream mayonnaise"Not a brand or a bottled product. In books of this period it generally means plain mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream folded in at the end, in proportions that vary from book to book. A few tablespoons of mayonnaise with whipped cream folded through is about right for this quantity.
- Skinned and seeded white grapesWhite here means green. The instruction dates from an era of thick-skinned seeded table grapes; modern seedless green grapes need only halving, no peeling.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut sold everywhere today, as opposed to the black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the fruit. Toasting is not called for and would change the character of the sandwich.
- Quantities and yieldA medium pineapple gives roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups shredded and drained, which with the grapes and nuts makes enough filling for a plateful of sandwiches cut into halves or fingers. Scale the dressing to bind, not to coat.
- The butter is structuralButter the thin bread right to the edges and keep it soft but not melted. It is the moisture barrier between a wet filling and a delicate crumb, which is also what the lettuce leaf is doing.
- The cherryThe recipe says only a red cherry; a maraschino or candied cherry is the likely intent. Add it at the last moment, as syrup will bleed pink into bread and mayonnaise.
Fruit-and-nut sandwiches like this one belong to the golden age of the American ladies' luncheon, when the sandwich shed its role as portable labourer's food and became a small, crustless, deliberately dainty thing served with tea or as a salad course. Pineapple was central to that fashion: Hawaiian canning had grown rapidly in the first years of the twentieth century, and the fruit carried a lingering association with hospitality and expense even as it became affordable. Grapes peeled by hand, walnuts chopped fine, and mayonnaise softened with whipped cream all signal the same thing, which is unhurried domestic labour on display.