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Fruit and Nuts
A pair of grape scissors should be laid on the fruit-dish to use in dividing large bunches of grapes or raisins; but a nut-cracker is too suggestive of hotel life to be acceptable on the home table. Crack the nuts before they are sent to the table. Salt should be served with the nuts. Pass oranges, apples, pears, peaches, and bananas in the fruit-dish, to allow each person the opportunity of choice.
Watermelon. Before serving, cut a slice from each end. Make incisions through the middle in the form of the letter V, separate the parts, and place each in an upright position. Cut through the divisions, and serve one section to each person.
Cantaloupes, if small, are sometimes served cut in halves. If large, divide from end to end in nature's lines of depression.
A short page from the serving half of the book, and its best line is not about fruit. A nut-cracker is ruled off the home table as too suggestive of hotel life. The nuts are to be cracked in the kitchen.
- The nut-cracker ruleThe objection is not practical. A nut-cracker on the table suggested a hotel, where diners fended for themselves, and a home table was supposed to arrive with everything already done. Almost every judgement in this book works that way: the question is never convenience but what the arrangement says about the house.
- Grape scissorsA small pair of scissors laid on the fruit dish, used to cut a few grapes off a large bunch instead of tearing them away. They are still made, and the reason for them holds: a torn bunch looks picked over, and the next person has to handle what you touched.
- Salt with the nutsSalt is to be served alongside, as a small dish on the table. Shelled walnuts and almonds dipped in salt was the ordinary way to eat them at the end of a meal, and the salt dish was part of the dessert service rather than an afterthought.
- Pass the dish, do not plate itOranges, apples, pears, peaches and bananas go round in one dish so each person can choose. Choice was the courtesy, and a plated portion took it away. The same logic governs the carver who is told to offer the crisp fat rather than decide for the table.
- The watermelon methodTrim a slice off each end so it will stand, cut a zigzag of V incisions round the middle, pull the two parts away from each other, set each cut side up, then cut down through the points to make the wedges. The V does the decorative work: the halves separate into a crown.
- Nature’s lines of depressionA cantaloupe is to be divided end to end along the grooves in its rind, because the flesh parts there. The phrase is fussy and the observation is correct, and it is the sort of thing a carving book notices and a recipe book never does.
Fruit and nuts came last, after the sweet, and the service of them was a set piece: the dish passed round, the scissors laid ready, the salt out, the nuts already cracked somewhere else. Everything on the page removes work from the table, and the nut-cracker sentence gives away the reason. A home table was being judged against a hotel table and had to look less commercial, which in practice meant more labour performed out of sight. There is a second absence worth noticing. The page says nothing about plates, fruit knives or finger bowls, because it was written for a table that already had them and for a reader who would have thought the mention odd. The instruction a modern host actually needs — what to put down, and in what order — is the one piece of information the book assumed nobody could possibly require.