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Florida Salad
Remove the peel from six large Florida Navel oranges. Separate the sections, and peel off the membrane, keeping the pulp in its original shape. Cut each section crosswise once. Dispose the orange cubes equally in nests of lettuce-heart leaves. Arrange the Fifth Sunday halves of English walnuts over these and marinate with French Dressing, using lemon and orange juice, also some of the fine orange pulp, in place of vinegar. Sprinkle with paprika.
A citrus and nut salad that depends entirely on how cleanly the oranges are broken down. Everything else is assembly.
- Supreming the oranges"Peel off the membrane, keeping the pulp in its original shape" means what a modern kitchen calls supreming: cut away peel and white pith, then free each segment from its enclosing membrane with a small sharp knife. Doing it over a bowl catches the juice you will need for the dressing.
- That stray "Fifth Sunday"The phrase reads as a stray artifact of typesetting or cross-referencing rather than an instruction; its origin is unclear. Read the line as "arrange the halves of English walnuts over these."
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the native American black walnut, which is far more assertive and would swamp the oranges. Use ordinary walnut halves, and toast them lightly if they taste flat.
- French Dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange-red bottled dressing sold under that name today. It is a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part acid, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken until cloudy.
- The acid substitutionLemon and orange juice replace the vinegar, and the recipe also asks for some of the crushed pulp. Orange juice alone is too mild and sweet to balance the oil, so keep lemon as the larger share of the two.
- Lettuce-heart leavesThe pale inner leaves of a head lettuce, cupped to hold the fruit. Butterhead or the heart of a romaine both work; anything loose-leaved will not form the nest.
- Dress at the last momentDressing and timing -- Cut orange weeps quickly and oil slides off wet fruit, so dressing shortly before serving keeps things neat; note, though, that the recipe says "marinate," which in period usage means to dress and let the fruit stand in it. The paprika goes on last either way.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; it only says to divide the cubes equally among the nests. Six oranges would divide comfortably among about six individual salads.
Florida oranges are the whole point of the recipe's title. By the time this book was written, refrigerated rail cars had made Southern citrus a reliable winter luxury in Northern cities, and a winter menu could feature fresh fruit that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. The navel orange itself is generally traced to a seedless mutation propagated from Bahia, Brazil, in the 1870s and spread by grafting, which is why every navel orange tastes much alike. The dish belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century "fruit salads" served in lettuce cups with a light vinaigrette, a fashion that ran alongside the heavier mayonnaise-bound salads of the same period.