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Orange Salads
For any of the following forms of salad peel the fruit to the juice-pulp, cutting out core and heavy "rag." With quite tart fruit serve the oranges sliced on lettuce, tender cabbage leaves or sorrel, with a simple French dressing, using wild orange juice instead of vinegar (three tablespoons of oil to one of acid). Season with salt and paprika or tabasco.
This dressing may be omitted and the salad varied by substituting sherry with a little paprika as a finish. Other forms of salad may be prepared by mixing the orange with chopped celery-stalks, apples and nuts, one or all, or with banana alone (sliced) and serving with mayonnaise. (See Introductory Recipes.)
A set of variations rather than a single dish, and the whole thing hinges on how the orange is prepared: everything bitter has to come off before dressing goes anywhere near it.
- "Peel to the juice-pulp"This means cutting the peel and all the white pith away down to the glistening flesh. The recipe then has the fruit sliced, so full segment-by-segment work is optional. Doing it over a bowl catches the juice, which you will want for the dressing.
- What "rag" meansThe heavy rag is the tough central core and the papery membrane between segments. Left in, it turns leathery in dressing and carries most of the bitterness, which is why the instruction comes first.
- Wild orange juice"Wild orange" here most likely means the naturalized sour orange (Citrus aurantium) that ran feral in Florida and the Gulf states -- sharply acid, not sweet. Substitute fresh lime juice, or two parts lemon to one part sweet orange juice.
- The dressing ratioThree tablespoons of oil to one of acid is the same proportion as the modern 3:1 vinaigrette. Citrus juice is less acidic than vinegar, so if you use lime, taste before adding more oil.
- The sherry versionDry or medium sherry rather than cream sherry, and used undressed: the recipe treats it as a finish, the fruit simply moistened with it and dusted with paprika.
- Sorrel and cabbageSorrel is sharply lemony and worth seeking at farmers' markets; use only young leaves. "Tender cabbage leaves" means the pale inner heart, shredded fine, not the tough outer wrappers.
- Paprika and tabascoPaprika of the period was generally mild and often used as much for colour as for heat, so use sweet Hungarian rather than smoked, which will bully the fruit. Tabasco goes in the dressing, a drop or two, not on the plate.
- MayonnaiseThe book's own mayonnaise, referred to in the Introductory Recipes, is a raw-yolk emulsion. If you make it fresh, use pasteurized eggs, or use a good commercial jar thinned with a little of the orange juice.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Figure one medium orange per person for a side salad, two if the orange-and-banana version is standing in for dessert; dress it immediately before serving, as banana darkens fast.
Citrus salads like these belong to a moment in early twentieth-century American cookery when oranges stopped being a Christmas-stocking luxury and became a shipped commodity, and growers' associations and fruit-focused cookbooks set about persuading households to eat them at every course rather than only out of hand. The dressing instruction calls for a sour "wild orange," generally traced to the bitter oranges planted by Spanish colonists that seeded themselves through Florida hammocks, and for generations it was the household souring agent of choice where lemons were scarce. Paprika and tabasco as the seasoning, and sherry as an alternative to any dressing at all, place the recipes squarely in the genteel salad fashion of the period, when a fruit salad was expected to arrive on a lettuce leaf and be handled with restraint.