Unusual Fall Apple Salad

Max, dear, you are so right about the fresh apples and fresh spices. I could not live without my nutmeg grater.

If you are looking for an unusual salad for the ladies, try this one. It is easy and blends some of my favorite foods: apples, peanut butter, and cream cheese. You can dress this up with a lettuce leaf as the base for the salad, or you can place a few purple, seedless grapes on the side, or some mandarin orange segments. Just about any fruit will work.

The Bretton Woods Dressing (wasn’t that a World War I battle? Or was it one of those arms reductions treaties that lead to WWII?) is good on most fruit salads and very nice on tossed lettuce ones too.

The leftover cream cheese-peanut butter bland makes a nice dip for apples and other fresh fruit.

Apple, Peanut Butter, and Cheese Salad:

2 Red Delicious Apples
6 ounces of cream cheese–room temp
½ cup chunky peanut butter

Blend peanut butter and cream cheese well, and form into small balls.

Polish and core the apples and slice into ½ inch thick slices just before serving.

Place apple slices on salad plate (lettuce leaf underneath is optional). Place peanut butter balls in center of apple slices. Drizzle Bretton Wood Dressing over.

Bretton Woods Dressing:

1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon paprika
½ cup apple juice (or another other fruit juice. If very sweet cut out sugar)
¼ cup lemon juice
½ cup olive oil
3 tablespoons sugar

Place all in a small mixing bowl. Chill and let set for several hours. Just before serving, beat dressing hard with a hand whisk.

Dressing is good on most fresh fruit salads and lettuce salads. The dressing helps keep the apple slices from turning dark.

Serves 4 generously

Illinois Central Salad Dressing

Erma, I can always depend on you to have an “alcohol enhanced dessert” that you call medicinal. Who, but you, would have a “cure” for heat that is really a booze pie? I’m so sick of the heat that I’m about to take a double dose of your Brandy Flip Pie. It may not bring the temperature down, but after two slices, who’ll care?

Since we seem to be living on salads this week, I am sending you a real treasure. It is the old Illinois Central Railroad Salad Dressing. This was the only recipe that included the railroad’s name and was always prepared fresh on the train. When I make it, often in double batches, I look at the original directions that said to allocate 45 minutes to prepare, and I see how fast I can put it together. Imagine standing there in a swaying railroad dining car kitchen with a large chef’s knife “chopping fine” all those vegetables? And you know that they didn’t make it up one quart at a time. Some poor beginning cook probably spent hours of his day making up gallons of this dressing. What that fellow (I don’t think there were ever women chefs on trains back then) would have given for a food processor like the KitchenAid 7-Cup Food Processor. Just throw in the veggies, hit the pulse button a couple of times, and voila, it is “chopped fine.” Mere seconds.

Illinois Central Salad Dressing:

2 tablespoons celery
2 tablespoons green pepper
1 teaspoon green onion
2 tablespoons dill pickle
2 tablespoon pimento
2 hard boiled eggs
2 cups mayonnaise
1 cup chili sauce

In my original recipe, the directions said to chop all the ingredients fine. Today we are lucky and can use the food processor and cut out all sorts of chopping time. In a large bowl mix all the vegetables and the eggs and then add the mayonnaise. Slowly stir in the chili sauce. Chill well, and store in a one quart storage container.

Makes one quart. Use any place one would use a Thousand Island like dressing.

Original directions say this will take 45 minutes to prepare. See how much time a good food processor will save you?.

Rich, Sweet Tomato Dressing

Erma dear, I love my Shaker cookbooks too, and I have you to thank for taking me to Shakertown at Pleasant Hill. We have spent so many days wandering through the grounds and looking at all the exhibits and displays. I will even confess to snipping a few buds and seeds from herbs in their herb gardens to bring home.

Imagine the Shaker sisters cooking for a hundred or more at each meal in their giant kitchens, which they wisely placed partly underground for cooling, and then preserving, drying, canning. So many people think of the Shakers as one of those odd groups (okay, they were communal and celibate) who did everything in old fashioned ways like the Amish. What people forget is that the Shakers were big into inventing labor saving devices. If there were Shaker sisters today, they would be the first to use food processors, commercial mixers, and heavy duty baking equipment.

Recently I found some Washington State Walla Walla onions in the grocery. How they ended up here in Iowa, I do not know, but there were a couple small bags and I grabbed all they had. You know me Erma, I ate one straight out of the bag. I firmly believe that onions are a health food.

When we stayed at a little B and B outside Seattle several years ago, they served a salad dressing with Walla Walla onions. It works with other varieties as well, just not quite as sweet. This is a robust dressing with plenty of tang to enliven bland mostly lettuce salads.

Onion Dressing From Washington State:

1 small Walla Walla sweet onion
¼ cup catsup
½ cup salad oil
¼ cup wine vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 ½ teaspoons paprika

Finely grate the onion on a grater. Add everything else and whip with a whisk well. Refrigerate. Before serving you may need to stir the dressing again.

Makes 1 ½ cups

Perfection Salad For 50

I’ve just the salad to go with your Monster Meat Loaf, Erma. It’s another of Mel’s Feed A Ship sized recipes. This is actually one of his smaller recipes. I guess sailors didn’t eat as much salad as they did desserts, or bean soup, as this one only makes 50 servings.

Perfection Salad For 50:

18 ounces of lemon Jell-O
2 3/4 quarts of boiling water
1/2 cup sweet pickle juice
3 large sweet pickles
1 bunch of celery
2 green peppers
2 heads of cabbage

Dissolve the lemon Jell-O in water and add pickle juice. Chill until it begins to set up. Chop pickles, celery, peppers, and cabbage in heavy duty food processor. Stir into lemon Jell-O and chill until firm. Cut in squares.

If you’re not up to serving 50 guests, here is a much better recipe that serves 6. It is an old Mennonite recipe from the 1930’s, but still is good. Perfection Salad originally was more of a winter dish because it featured cabbage which was always available in the winter while lettuce often disappeared off the store shelves. Today, Perfection Salad is better in the summer, or at least I think so. It’s such a nice change from the daily tossed lettuce salads

Mennonite Perfection Salad and Dressing:

2 tablespoons plain gelatin, like Knox’s
1/2 cup cold water
1/2 cup vinegar
Juice of 1 lemon
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup sugar
Scant teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups diced celery
1 1/2 cups shredded cabbage
3 chopped pimientos (or you can use a red or green pepper)

Soak gelatin in cold water, then add hot water, vinegar, lemon juice, salt and sugar. Chill. When thickened, stir in all the vegetables and chill until firm in a 13 inch casserole, or a fancy, mold like the KitchenAid Silicone Fluted Cake Pan. Top each serving with:

Dressing:

2/3 cup condensed milk
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon dry mustard
Pinch salt

Using a whisk and a large mixing bowl, whip up until thick. Makes about a cup and a half. Store in a 2-cup Pyrex storage container. The extra keeps nicely for several days and is good on other salads as well.