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Blood Orange Salad
Take the pulp from eight blood oranges, add one cup of Wiesbaden strawberries, the pulp of one grape fruit, one banana delicately sliced, and serve with the fruit syrup.
A three-line fruit salad that assumes a well-stocked late-Victorian larder. The only real work is getting the citrus out of its membrane cleanly, and the only real decision is what to use in place of the Wiesbaden strawberries.
- Wiesbaden strawberriesWiesbaden was known for preserved fruit, and these were most likely whole strawberries put up in heavy sugar syrup and imported as a luxury item, though the details of how they were sold are not certain. Good-quality strawberries in syrup, or strawberries macerated for an hour in a couple of tablespoons of sugar, stand in for them; fresh unsweetened berries will taste thin against the citrus.
- "Take the pulp"Not mashed fruit. Cut the peel and all white pith from the oranges and grapefruit, then cut each segment free of its membrane over a bowl so the juice is caught. The membrane is what makes citrus salads bitter and stringy.
- The fruit syrupThe recipe itself gives no formula, and the definite article suggests one may appear elsewhere in the book. The juice caught while segmenting, warmed with sugar to taste until dissolved and then chilled, is a plausible reading; the syrup drained from the preserved strawberries works as well and saves a step.
- Blood orangesThen as now a winter fruit, roughly December to April in the Northern Hemisphere. Moro and Tarocco are the common supermarket varieties; the colour deepens later in the season, and out of season a navel orange gives the flavour but none of the effect the recipe is built around.
- Add the banana lastSliced banana browns within minutes and goes soft in acid. Slice it directly into the dressed salad just before it goes to the table.
- TemperatureAssemble and chill for half an hour or so; the citrus segments soften and weep the longer they sit. Serve in glass so the colour of the blood orange is visible.
- YieldEight oranges and a grapefruit make roughly six servings as a first course or dessert salad, more if it is one of several dishes on a buffet.
Fruit salads sat oddly in cookbooks of this era: a "salad" was defined by its dressing and its place in the menu, not by whether it was sweet, and a dish of dressed fruit could arrive before the sweet course or alongside game. The recipe reads like a shopping list for an urban household with access to imported goods \— blood oranges and grapefruit from Florida or the West Indies, bananas that were becoming cheaper, by most accounts thanks to improvements in refrigerated shipping, and a jar of German preserved strawberries bought for exactly this kind of display. Grapefruit in particular was still something of a novelty in American kitchens at the turn of the century, having moved from a curiosity to a breakfast fixture within a generation, and its appearance here marks the salad as fashionable rather than homely.