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Orange Salad
1 tablespoon brandy, 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon chopped tarragon, 1 teaspoon chopped chervil, and 6 oranges. Cut peel from oranges, carefully removing all pith, cut out pulpy pieces in each of natural divisions so that there is no skin of any kind or pips taken out with pieces fruit, sprinkle over these pieces tarragon, chervil, melted Crisco, brandy and sugar. This salad should be placed on ice if possible 1 hour before serving.
A plain orange salad of the kind served alongside duck or game, with one detail that will not work as written in a modern refrigerator.
- The Crisco problemMelted shortening is solid at refrigerator temperature and will set into white flecks on cold orange segments. Use a tablespoon of a mild oil — light olive, grapeseed or sunflower — if you want the dressing to stay liquid.
- Why Crisco is here at allThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, so the fat appears in places no cook would otherwise put it. Treat it as advertising rather than technique.
- Cutting the fruitWhat the recipe describes is supreming: peel the orange down to the flesh so no white pith remains, then cut each segment free of its membrane. Work over a bowl so the juice is caught and goes into the salad.
- "Placed on ice"An hour in the refrigerator. When the book was published that meant the icebox; the point is simply that the herbs and brandy need time to perfume the fruit.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh and does not dry well. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the usual stand-in; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- SugarHalf a teaspoon across six oranges is a seasoning, not a sweetener. Depending on how sweet your oranges are, you may want none at all.
- YieldSix oranges dress six to eight small side portions. Serve it with duck, goose, pork or cold ham rather than as a first course.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and issued by Procter & Gamble as a promotional volume for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening launched in 1911 — which explains why a bowl of oranges and herbs is asked to carry a spoonful of melted vegetable fat. Orange salad itself is much older and quite unrelated to shortening: cut oranges served as a sharp accompaniment to fatty roast birds are long established in English and French cookery, the acidity doing the work a fruit sauce or jelly would otherwise do. Tarragon and chervil are both among the classic fines herbes, which places this version closer to a French kitchen than an American one.