Home › November › Pepper and Fruit Salad
Pepper and Fruit Salad
Select the desired number of uniform-sized peppers, having half red and half green. Cut a slice from the stem ends, remove the seeds and veins; arrange them on beds of water cress, pepper grass, chicory or lettuce. Fill peppers with the pulp of grapefruit cut in large cubes, Malaga grapes skinned, seeded and cut in halves lengthwise, and butter nut meats broken in pieces, allowing twice the quantity of grapefruit as grapes and one cup of nut meats. Moisten with Mayonnaise Dressing. Fill peppers. Place a rosette of Mayonnaise on top of each pepper, using pastry bag and rose tube. Sprinkle the green peppers with finely chopped green peppers, and the red peppers with chopped red peppers. Garnish top of each with the half of a butternut meat.
A composed salad from the era when the shell mattered as much as the filling. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the three named ingredients have effectively left the market.
- The peppersThese are sweet bell peppers, served raw as cups. Choose short, squat ones that sit flat; if they wobble, shave the base rather than the stem end. Chill them in ice water for 20 minutes after seeding to crisp them and take the edge off the raw bite.
- Malaga grapesA large, thick-skinned muscat table grape once shipped in cork-packed barrels and available through the late autumn and winter keeping season. Red Globe grapes are the closest thing on sale now; they skin and seed with the same effort. Any large seedless red grape halved lengthwise works, and you skip the peeling.
- ButternutsJuglans cinerea, the white walnut, now scarce in the wild because of canker and rarely sold. English walnuts are the usual substitute, though they are sharper; buttery pecan halves are closer in flavor and give you the half-nut garnish the recipe asks for.
- Pepper grassGarden cress, sold as a peppery microgreen or sprouted at home. Watercress alone does the job, and arugula stands in for the heat.
- ProportionsThe instruction is by volume: for every cup of grape halves use two cups of grapefruit, plus one cup of nuts total for the whole salad. Section the grapefruit over a bowl and drain it well, or the mayonnaise will slacken and pool in the pepper.
- The mayonnaiseTraditional mayonnaise is uncooked egg yolk. If you are serving anyone who should avoid that, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice so it still pipes.
- Piping and finishingA rose tube on a pastry bag gives the rosette; a small star tip is fine. The mayonnaise must be cold and stiff or the rosette collapses. The chopped-pepper trim is color matching, red on red and green on green, so dice it fine and add it at the last moment.
- Yield and timingFigure one pepper per person; the recipe fixes only the cup of nut meats and leaves the number of peppers to the cook, so scale the fruit to the number you are filling. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep refrigerated, since grapefruit juice weeps and the dressing loosens as it sits.
Stuffed raw vegetables piped with mayonnaise belong to the great age of the American "salad course," roughly 1890 to 1920, when a salad was judged largely on how it looked on the plate. Cookbooks of the period are full of pepper cases, tomato cases and cucumber cups, and the pastry bag was as much a salad tool as a pastry one. The combination follows autumn seasonal logic from before year-round shipping: Florida and Texas grapefruit were arriving, Malaga grapes were at the end of their long keeping season, and butternuts were a fall gathering nut in the Northeast and Midwest, cracked at home rather than bought shelled. That butternuts are now hard to find has less to do with taste than with butternut canker, a fungal disease first identified in the United States in the 1960s that has since killed much of the native population across its range.