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Garden Cress with Oranges
Arrange individual nests of Garden Cress on six chilled salad plates. Cut eight oranges in halves, remove the pulp, discarding veins and sections. Leave the pulp in the original shape as taken from the sections; divide the pulp evenly between the six nests. Serve with French Dressing and sprinkle each portion with paprika and a few grains cayenne. Omit the garlic when using fruit.
A composed fruit salad from the era when a green salad on a Sunday table was still something of a statement. Nearly all of the work is in the oranges.
- The hinge: sectioning the oranges"Remove the pulp, discarding veins and sections" means supreming — cutting each segment free of its membrane so only clean flesh remains, holding its wedge shape. Halving the oranges first, as written, is awkward; it is easier to cut off top and bottom, pare away peel and pith down to the flesh, then cut between the membranes over a bowl to catch the juice.
- Garden cress is not watercressGarden cress (Lepidium sativum) is the peppery seedling green sold today as cress or sometimes as pepper grass, often in punnets. Watercress or mâche will stand in, though watercress is sharper and coarser in leaf; whatever you use, it should be small enough to mound into a loose "nest".
- French dressing of the periodIn an American book of this period this means a simple vinaigrette vvinegar or lemon juice, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to emulsify. It is not the sweetened orange-red bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Why the garlic is omittedSome period dressings were made by rubbing the salad bowl with a cut clove, or steeping a crushed clove in the dressing; the instruction to leave it out with fruit suggests this recipe assumes such a dressing. A little of the caught orange juice in place of some of the vinegar suits the dish.
- Paprika and cayennePaprika here is the mild sweet kind, used as much for colour as flavour — a red dusting against green and orange. "A few grains" of cayenne means precisely that; it is a warm note behind the fruit, not heat you should be able to name.
- Chill everythingThe plates are specified cold, and the salad has no other structure to hold it together. Chill the cress, the orange sections and the plates, and dress only at the moment of serving or the greens will collapse.
- YieldSix plates, as stated. Eight oranges for six servings is generous; fewer will stretch if you are careful with the knife.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the American menu-book tradition of the early twentieth century, which supplied the housekeeper with a complete meal for every week of the year rather than a set of standalone dishes. Citrus of this kind depended on the railroads: refrigerated cars carried California and Florida fruit east, and oranges had become far more widely available than they had been a generation earlier. The construction vgreens arranged in individual "nests", fruit set on top, dressing and paprika applied at the last moment vis characteristic of period salad-making, when the appeal of a salad was understood to be as much visual as gustatory. The direction to omit the garlic suggests the dressing normally carried it.