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ORANGE SALAD (another way)
Select St. Michael or Messina oranges of uniform size and small, cut them into thin slices and the slices into quarters. Marinade with one-third of a cup of olive oil, two table-spoonfuls of lemon-juice, six drops of tabasco sauce, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and one tea-spoonful of paprika mixed together. Serve on a bed of water-cress.
A savoury citrus salad in the French style, dressed rather than sugared. The whole thing takes ten minutes, and the only real decisions are the fruit and the moment of dressing.
- Peel firstThe instruction to slice the oranges assumes a cook who knows to remove the skin and all the white pith beforehand. Peel with a knife rather than by hand, cutting just deep enough to expose the flesh, then slice crosswise as thinly as you can manage and quarter the rounds.
- St. Michael and Messina orangesSt. Michael's were small, sweet, thin-skinned oranges shipped from the Azores; Messina oranges came from Sicily and were prized for juice. Neither is a supermarket category now. Small navels, clementines or tangerines give the same effect; blood oranges are closer still to the Sicilian fruit.
- The dressing, in modern measureOne-third cup olive oil to two tablespoons lemon juice is roughly 3:1, about the same ratio as a classic vinaigrette, though here the orange brings its own sweetness. Whisk the salt into the lemon juice before adding the oil so it dissolves.
- Go carefully with the paprikaA full teaspoon is a great deal, and the intent is colour and mild fruity heat, not fire. Use sweet Hungarian or Spanish paprika from a fresh tin; old paprika tastes of dust and will flatten the whole dish.
- TabascoSix drops is only about 1/16 teaspoon. The sauce has been made since the late 1860s.
- Dress lateWatercress collapses within minutes of meeting an acid dressing. Marinate the orange for 10 to 15 minutes if you like, but arrange it on the cress only as the salad goes to table, and spoon over just enough of the marinade to gloss the leaves.
- YieldNo quantity of oranges is given. Reckon one small orange per person, which makes this dressing enough for four to six as a side salad.
- Where it belongs on the menuSharp, oily and peppery, a salad of this kind sits better against roast duck, goose or game than at the end of a meal.
Orange salads split into two families in nineteenth-century English cookery: the dessert kind, sliced and steeped in sugar and a little liqueur, and this savoury kind, dressed with oil and acid and set on greens as a foil to rich roast meat. The presence of Tabasco and paprika may suggest a later recipe, though that is inference rather than documented fact. The named oranges tell you as much as the dressing does: Britain imported citrus from the Azores, Sicily, Spain and Palestine, and cooks distinguished between them by origin as confidently as we now distinguish varieties, St. Michael's being the byword for a sweet, small, easily peeled fruit.