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Grapefruit Salad
Take out inside of grapefruit, and cut edge of shell into points; slice meat of fruit with 2 oranges, 1 cup pineapple, 1 cup cherries, 1/2 cup chopped nut meats, 1 diced apple, the juice of 1 lemon, and 3 tablespoons powdered sugar; fill shell, and serve with following dressing:
Beat yolks 2 eggs until creamy, then add to them 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard and same quantity salt. Next beat in slowly 4 tablespoons melted Crisco and 6 tablespoons hot vinegar. Cook in double boiler until it thickens. When cold, and just before serving, 1 cup of cream, sweet or sour, may be folded in.
Two separate jobs here: a fruit salad served in the hollowed grapefruit halves, and a cooked yolk-and-vinegar dressing of the type once called a boiled dressing. The dressing is where the recipe can go wrong.
- The hinge: keep the dressing below a simmerThe yolks will thicken in the double boiler at around 160-170F and scramble not far above that. Keep the water hot but not boiling, stir constantly, and pull it off the moment it coats the spoon; it tightens further as it cools.
- Add the hot vinegar slowlySix tablespoons of hot vinegar poured in at once will curdle the yolks before they ever reach the double boiler. Dribble it in while whisking, as you would temper any custard.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it. Crisco is still made, but any neutral oil works in the same quantity; melted shortening will set the dressing firmer when chilled, oil leaves it looser.
- Powdered sugarIn cookbooks of this era the term usually means finely granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match, though either will dissolve in the fruit juice.
- "Meat of fruit"The flesh, membrane removed. Segment the grapefruit and oranges over a bowl so the juice goes into the salad rather than the board, and drain the pineapple and cherries if using canned.
- CherriesFresh cherries had only a short summer season when the book was written, so canned or candied cherries may well have been what was meant. Fresh, pitted and halved, works well; maraschino gives a sweeter, pinker result.
- Cutting the shellHalve the grapefruit crosswise, remove the flesh with a curved knife, then notch the rim with scissors or a paring knife. Trim any thick pith from the inside so the shell sits flat.
- The creamFold in unsweetened whipped or plain heavy cream at the last minute. Sour cream, offered as an equal option, gives a sharper dressing that suits the sweet fruit better.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many grapefruit are needed; it speaks of filling a single shell, though the quantity of cut fruit would fill more than one. The dressing itself makes roughly three-quarters of a cup before the optional cup of cream is folded in.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911, which is why hydrogenated shortening turns up in a salad dressing where oil or butter would once have gone. The dressing itself is a boiled dressing, the older American alternative to mayonnaise: eggs, mustard, vinegar and fat cooked to a custard rather than emulsified cold, and standard in home kitchens before bottled mayonnaise became common. Grapefruit in a fruit salad marks the period too. Commercial groves in Florida had only recently made the fruit widely available in the North, and it carried a mild air of novelty and luxury; serving the salad back in its own notched shell is exactly the sort of table effect the era prized.