Pineapple Salad

History

This recipe is printed in Martha McCulloch-Williams's "Dishes & Beverages of the Old South," published in New York by McBride, Nast & Company in October 1913, within the book's "Soups, Salads, Relishes" section. As the book gives it, slices of a very ripe, sweet pineapple are macerated overnight — kept cool, but not on ice — in a sprinkle of sugar, half a cup of rum or sherry, the juice shed in cutting, and a grate of nutmeg; each slice is then laid on a rosette of small lettuce leaves, its center filled with a marble-sized ball of pimento cheese stuck with a tiny sprig of celery top, and finished with the reserved syrup and a sharp French dressing. The book directs making the pimento cheese "by grinding fine half a can of pimento, and mixing it through two cakes of cream cheese, softening the cheese with French dressing, and seasoning it to taste".

Those two ingredients — canned pimentos and commercial cream cheese — tie the dish to the documented history of pimento cheese, which food historian Robert F. Moss traces not to the South but to Northern industrial food manufacturing: "It started as a way to combine two newly-available products of industrial food manufacturing: cream cheese and canned pimentos." Moss writes that commercially made pimento cheese "hit the market around the beginning of 1910 and was distributed to grocery stores across the country, starting in the Midwest," and that through the 1920s and 1930s the many cookbooks and advertisements featuring it gave "none of them describe it as being in any way a Southern thing". This 1913 salad appears only a few years after that commercial emergence and is built from exactly those manufactured products.

Beyond the recipe itself and this general context for its pimento-cheese component, the historical record does not document a specific inventor, place of origin, or line of transmission for this particular pineapple-and-pimento-cheese salad, and the book supplies no history for it.

Ingredients

• 1 pineapple
• 1/2 cup rum or sherry
• pineapple juice
• 1 nutmeg
• small lettuce leaves
• 1/2 can pimento
• 2 cakes cream cheese
• French dressing
• celery top
• sugar

Instructions

1. Pare and core a very ripe, sweet pineapple and cut it into slices crosswise. Lay the slices in a bowl with a sprinkle of sugar, half a cup rum or sherry, all the juice shed in cutting, and a grate of nutmeg. Let stand till morning in a cool place, but not on ice.
2. Make the pimento cheese by grinding fine half a can of pimento and mixing it through two cakes of cream cheese. Soften the cheese with French dressing and season to taste.
3. Make rosettes of small lettuce leaves in the serving plates. Lay a slice of pineapple on each rosette and fill the hole in the center with a ball of pimento cheese the size of a marble. Stick a tiny sprig of celery top into each cheese ball.
4. Pour a little of the syrup from the bowl into each plate, then finish with very sharp French dressing.