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Orange and Tomato Salad
3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 4 tomatoes 4 oranges 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Tarragon vinegar Salt Peel oranges and tomatoes, and slice and arrange alternately in salad bowl. Mix juice squeezed from "tops and bottoms" of oranges with an equal quantity of tarragon vinegar, add Crisco and salt to taste. Pour over fruit and sprinkle chopped parsley on top.
A simple composed salad from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, which explains the one instruction a modern cook should ignore. Everything else is straightforward and still good.
- Melted Crisco in a cold dressingHydrogenated shortening is solid at room temperature and will set into white flecks the moment it meets chilled orange and tomato. Use 3 tablespoons of a mild olive oil or other salad oil instead; the recipe was written to sell shortening, not because it works here.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth buying rather than substituting, since its anise note is what ties the orange to the tomato. A white wine vinegar steeped a week with a few tarragon sprigs does the same job.
- "Tops and bottoms"The stem and blossom ends trimmed off the oranges before peeling. Squeeze them over a bowl; the yield is small, perhaps a tablespoon or two from four oranges, and the recipe simply asks you to match it with an equal quantity of vinegar.
- Peeling the orangesCut away the peel and all white pith with a knife rather than pulling it off by hand, or the slices will be bitter and ragged. Slice crosswise into rounds about a quarter inch thick.
- Peeling the tomatoesThe recipe calls for it explicitly. Score the base, drop into boiling water for 15 to 20 seconds, then into ice water and the skins slip off. Use firm ripe tomatoes so the slices hold their shape.
- Dressing at the last momentSalt draws water out of both fruits within minutes and the bowl floods. Arrange the slices ahead if you like, but mix and pour the dressing just before serving.
- YieldFour generous side servings. Good with cold poultry or ham.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had come on the market in 1911. That accounts for the shortening appearing in places no cook would independently put it, including a cold vinaigrette; the book's job was to show the new fat doing everything butter, lard and salad oil had done. The salad itself belongs to a wider fashion of the 1900s and 1910s for fruit in the salad course, encouraged by California and Florida citrus reaching northern markets by refrigerated rail in quantity. Oranges paired with tomatoes look startling now but made sense to a cook who thought of both as acid fruits to be sharpened with vinegar and softened with oil.