"Main Dish" salads that leave you wanting more.... (but not necessarily more of the salad)

I picked up McCall's Salads & Salad Dressings (McCall's, 1965) because it had a big, beautiful molded salad on the cover.

And I fully expected to write about all the wild molded salads inside. But, as I read through it, I kept getting distracted by its ideas about what constitutes a main course. This started to feel like it was really just a diet book marketed as a salad book. 

My first inkling that this book seriously underestimated main dishes was in the first chapter-- about fruit salads-- when I spotted Gold-and-White Summer Salad.

Check out the note at the bottom: "Makes 4 main-dish servings, or 8 salad servings." Would anyone really count a quarter of a cantaloupe with a half-cup of cottage cheese as a main dish (unless they had an eating disorder)? I know American portion sizes have grown over the years, but I can't imagine this seemed like a substantial main course even in 1965.

And then I got to the Main-Dish Salads chapter. The picture of the Chef's Salad-Stuffed Tomatoes looked pretty generous...

...but then I realized that this plate is meant to serve four people.

Yep-- one medium tomato stuffed with a few slivers each of Swiss cheese, boiled ham, and sweet pickles constitutes the main portion of a meal. 

I also sometimes struggled to figure out how some of these dishes even counted as salads, much less dinner. The Cottage-Cheese and Cold-Cut Platter is just that...

...a platter of cottage cheese and cold cuts. What makes this a salad? Maybe it's the vegetable flecks mixed in with the cottage cheese? And if you think this platter is at least generous enough to give each diner a full ounce each of bologna, olive-and-pimiento loaf, and cheddar cheese, note that the recipe serves six. The only thing anybody gets much of is the cottage cheese.

The Watermelon-and-Chicken Salad probably comes closest to offering a main-dish-sized serving of something.

But that's assuming anyone wants to eat chicken, celery, toasted almonds, and watermelon in mayonnaise that has likely turned into pinkish-white melon-y soup.

Maybe these recipes were meant for ladies' luncheons, where the goal seems to have been to serve not much for the main course, but go heavy on the desserts? If you only eat a couple slivers of lunch meat, a bit of cottage cheese, and/ or a few stray raw fruits and veggies, that just means more room for sherbet and cookies!