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Orange Salad
Peel oranges, separate into lobes, and cut each lobe into three parts. Have ready, shelled and blanched, almonds. Grate or grind them to a coarse powder. Arrange the oranges on crisp lettuce leaves, sprinkle each lobe thickly with nut powder and serve with mayonnaise.
— Mrs. Willard E. Myers
One can salmon.
A short composed salad of the sort that filled the fruit-and-nut pages of community cookbooks a century ago. Two details need attention: the pith, and the stray line of type at the end.
- The stray sentence"One can salmon." -- has nothing to do with this salad and most likely belongs to a neighbouring receipt; close-set community cookbooks are prone to this kind of run-on. Ignore it.
- "Lobes" means segmentsPeel the oranges, then remove each segment from its membrane rather than simply pulling the fruit apart. Cutting a membraned segment in three leaves tough white edges that the nut powder only emphasizes. Supreming the fruit over a bowl catches the juice.
- Blanching almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for about a minute; the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Dry them well before grinding or the powder will clump into paste.
- Grind coarse, not fineThe receipt says coarse powder deliberately. A food processor run too long turns almonds to butter — pulse in short bursts, or chop by hand for a texture that stays visible on the fruit.
- Mayonnaise in 1900Mayonnaise -- The dressing intended here is a thick, sharp, hand-beaten mayonnaise, closer to modern homemade than to the sweetened commercial kind. If using a jarred mayonnaise, slacken it with a spoonful of the reserved orange juice and a squeeze of lemon.
- Lettuce"Crisp" points to a head lettuce cup — iceberg or the heart of a romaine. Chill the leaves in cold water and dry them thoroughly, since any water left on the leaf will thin the dressing.
- Yield and timingThe receipt gives no quantities. Reckoning one orange per person makes a first course or a salad alongside cold meat; four oranges and about half a cup of almonds will serve four. Assemble at the last moment -- the nut powder softens quickly once it meets the fruit.
Fruit salads dressed with mayonnaise look strange now, but they were the height of respectability in American home cooking from the 1890s through the 1920s, when "salad" meant something composed and arranged on a leaf rather than tossed. Oranges arriving by rail from Florida and California are often said to have become more widely available by then, and a bright orange salad in winter was a small display of the household's reach. The nut powder does double duty, adding richness the fruit lacks and giving the mayonnaise something to cling to. Community cookbooks like this one collected such receipts by name — Mrs. Willard E. Myers's contribution here is typical of the genre, a few lines assuming the cook already knows how to make mayonnaise and needs only the idea.