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Tarragon Fruit Salad
Add about 1 teaspoonful of chopped fresh tarragon, to 1/2 cupful of the lemon dressing, and serve it over cherries, strawberries, currants, raspberries, ripe tomatoes, bananas, or oranges.
Tarragon is a most delicate flavor. With a tomato salad, omit the water in the lemon dressing and use more sugar and a little salt. 1 teaspoonful of mint added to the cup of dressing is nearly equal to tarragon over the same fruits, and is especially nice combined with the flavor of oranges.
This is a flavoring variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's lemon dressing on hand, a simple mixture of lemon juice, sugar and water. The proportions are the whole point.
- The base dressingThe "lemon dressing" referred to is a sweetened lemon-and-water dressing given elsewhere in the book, not a vinaigrette; the recipe's own instruction to omit the water and add more sugar for tomatoes tells us that much. If you are working from scratch, lemon juice cut with a little water and sweetened to taste will sit in the right register.
- Herb ratioOne teaspoon of chopped tarragon to half a cup of dressing is a strong dose for a fresh herb. The mint direction gives one teaspoon to a full cup, so mint is used at half the strength of tarragon. Follow that difference rather than assuming a typographical slip.
- Chop, then waitChopped herbs release their flavor gradually into a cold liquid. Chop fine, stir into the dressing, and give it some time to stand before dressing the fruit; the flavor is likely to be weaker at first mixing than after it has sat.
- Fresh onlyThe recipe specifies fresh tarragon, and dried behaves quite differently in a cold sweet-acid dressing. If fresh is unavailable, skip the recipe.
- The tomato versionOmitting the water concentrates the lemon, and the extra sugar and salt compensate. This is essentially a sweet-sour dressing for tomatoes at their peak; it will not rescue a mealy winter tomato.
- Dress at the last momentStrawberries, raspberries and currants collapse quickly under sugar and acid. Combine within a few minutes of serving. Bananas need the acid immediately to keep from browning, so those can go in a little earlier.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. Half a cup of dressing is a small quantity, enough for a modest bowl of fruit for a few people, depending on how thoroughly you dress it.
Tarragon on fruit reads as an eccentric touch now, but it sits comfortably within the American salad enthusiasm of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when fruit salads with light sweetened dressings were fashionable at luncheon tables. French tarragon carries a faint anise note that sits easily beside berries and citrus, which may be why it was worth singling out as "a most delicate flavor" rather than a savory one. The alternative offered here, mint with oranges, is a longer-established pairing, and the entry's willingness to treat the two herbs as near-equivalents is characteristic of how compendium cookbooks were built: a base recipe given once, with variations listed as a chain of small substitutions the reader could run through a summer's worth of fruit.