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Orange and Grapefruit Salad
Pare 3 oranges and 2 grapefruit, removing membrane with the skin, then remove sections free from membrane. Arrange on Lettuce leaves on individual plates in the form of stars, outlining the sections of the fruit with figs cut in narrow strips. Put a Spoonful of salad dressing in the center of each star and garnish, if desired, with Maraschino cherries. Any preferred salad dressing may be used. Dates may be used instead of figs. The fruit may be arranged on slices of Pineapple if desired. Chopped nuts may be sprinkled over the salad.
A composed fruit salad from the era when the ladies' luncheon plate was judged as much on geometry as on flavor. Nothing here is difficult, but the results depend almost entirely on how cleanly you break down the citrus.
- The hinge: cut the fruit properly"Pare, removing membrane with the skin" means cutting deep enough to take off all the white pith along with the peel, then freeing each segment from its enclosing wall — what a modern kitchen calls supreming. Slice off top and bottom, stand the fruit up, cut down the curve, then release each section over a bowl to catch the juice. Ragged, membrane-clad segments will not hold a star shape.
- Grapefruit has changed1920s grapefruit was generally white-fleshed and more astringent than the Ruby Red and Star Ruby types that dominate today, so the salad will read sweeter than intended; a white or Marsh grapefruit is closer to the original balance.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many it serves; three oranges and two grapefruit will yield roughly five or six star-shaped plates, more if the portions are small or a pineapple slice is used as a base.
- Salad dressing means something specificSalad dressing -- The recipe deliberately leaves this open ("Any preferred salad dressing may be used"). In a book of this period that would most often have meant a cooked dressing or a mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream rather than a vinaigrette; mayonnaise with a spoonful of whipped cream folded in is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Figs and datesUse dried Mission or Calimyrna figs, not fresh; fresh figs will not cut into strips that hold a line. Snip them with oiled scissors, which is faster and neater than a knife on sticky fruit.
- PineappleThe recipe says only "slices of Pineapple"; canned rings in juice, drained and blotted dry, are the likeliest reading and work well as a base. Fresh pineapple releases more liquid and contains bromelain, an enzyme that can turn a dairy-based dressing bitter or loose if the plates stand.
- Assemble lateCut citrus weeps quickly. Segment the fruit and chill it, drain it well, and build the plates shortly before they go out, or the lettuce will collapse and the dressing will slide.
Alice Bradley wrote For Luncheon and Supper Guests for the women's-magazine audience of the early 1920s, when fruit salads on lettuce were the fashionable center of a light meal and the arrangement of the plate was attended to with some care — hence the star, the outlining in fig strips, the optional maraschino cherry. Grapefruit had only recently become an everyday American fruit: commercial groves in Florida expanded from the late nineteenth century, the big Texas Rio Grande Valley expansion followed in the 1910s and 1920s, and refrigerated rail shipping put winter citrus on northern tables at exactly the moment such menus were being written. The list of substitutions at the end is characteristic of the period's cookery-school style, which Bradley knew from the inside as principal of Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston — a formula given once, then varied to fit whatever the pantry held.