When I was reading through Wonderful Ways to Prepare Salads (Jo Ann Shirley, 1978), I started to get the sense that Shirley was fixated on apples.
At first I thought I might be a bit too critical. I'm not really one for fruit and meat pairings, so I guessed apple and chicken wasn't that bad. People often have grapes in chicken salad or oranges on a Chinese chicken salad.
Apple and chicken salad didn't sound great to me, but somebody else probably likes it. But apple and tuna...?
Canned tuna with red (likely "Delicious") apples? Fishy, mealy, medicinal glop.
And potato and apple sounds like a surefire way to make diners who have a thing about textures feel pretty wary.
Once everything is mixed together, it might be hard to tell whether you're going to bite into a soft, cooked potato or a crunchy apple. Disconcerting.
Then I started noticing that apples were turning up in a lot of salads-- even ones that didn't mention apples in the title. For instance, one might reasonably assume that the Potato-Celery Salad doesn't have apples in it.
Pretty presumptuous of you to imagine that, though. Of course it has apples.
As does the Chicken and Asparagus Salad...
...and the Calico Salad...
Yes, MORE potatoes and apples, along with carrots, peas, bell peppers, onion, parsley, and lettuce this time.
Care to guess what the Stuffed Tomatoes are stuffed with?
Yep! More apples! This time with celery in an oil/ sour cream/ horseradish sauce.
There are so many apples in unexpected places that I half-expected to find out the book was partially sponsored by the apple industry, but apparently not. Even they realize that maybe apples don't belong in every salad. This is just a Jo Ann Shirley fixation.
Red apples. I often wonder if the flavor of red delicious apples have changed over time, or if our tastes in fruit have just changed that much. They probably still taste better than crab apples (I've never tried them), but by how much?
ReplyDeleteI feel like I read/ heard somewhere that red "delicious" apples originally tasted better, but they kept getting selected for appearance at the expense of taste, and that's why they suck today. (I have always hated them, though. When I was a kid, I was pretty wary about apples because sometimes they tasted good, but a lot of times they were disgusting. Then when I got older, I realized that I generally like apples-- I just had to figure out the specific varieties I hate and avoid those. So no red "delicious" (or Granny Smith, or empire) for me!)
DeleteThat makes sense. A quick Google search supports that. Apparently the goal was a bright red apple that stored and shipped well, but the genes that supported those attributes also controls flavor, and not in a good way.
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