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Fruit Salad (for twelve)
Six mellow sour apples, cut into dice.
Six oranges, pulp separated from inner skin, half a pound of blanched almonds cut fine with knite, dice cut from candied pineapple. Garnish with half walnuts and candied cherries. Serve on the inner leaves of crisp head lettuce, with a heaping spoon of mayonnaise dressing, or two spoons of French dressing, added just before serving.-Mrs Thomas K. Gray.
A late-Victorian composed fruit salad, built for a dozen people and meant to be assembled and dressed at the last minute. Nothing here is cooked, so the whole dish turns on the fruit you buy and the order in which you handle it.
- Dress at the very endThe instruction to add dressing "just before serving" is the hinge. Mayonnaise slackens and weeps once it sits on cut fruit, and lettuce leaves collapse within minutes. Combine fruit and nuts ahead, refrigerate, and dress plate by plate.
- "Mellow sour apples"Not underripe apples but a fully ripe variety with real acidity — Granny Smith, Gravenstein, Braeburn or a good Newtown Pippin. Sweet soft apples such as Red Delicious go mealy and leave the salad flat.
- Keep the apple from browningThe recipe gives no protection against oxidation. Dice the apples last and turn them straight into the juice released from the oranges, which will slow browning, though not as effectively as lemon juice.
- Segmenting the oranges"Pulp separated from inner skin" means supreming: cut away peel and white pith, then cut each segment free of its membrane. Work over a bowl and keep the juice.
- Blanched almondsBlanched means skinned, not toasted — pour boiling water over shelled almonds, stand a minute, and slip off the skins. Half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups, chopped; slivered blanched almonds from a packet are the modern shortcut.
- Candied pineapple and cherriesCandied (glacé) pineapple is still sold at Christmas and in cake-supply shops. Quantity is left entirely to the cook here; about 1 cup diced suits twelve portions. The candied cherries are decoration and can be left off without harm.
- What "French dressing" meantAt this period it meant essentially oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, with no sugar or tomato, though some contemporary versions added mustard or paprika. Roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar.
- Yield and servingTwelve small salad plates, each lined with inner lettuce leaves. A firm head lettuce such as iceberg answers the "crisp head lettuce" called for; the crispness is structural, not incidental.
Fruit salad dressed with mayonnaise looks strange now, but in the 1890s and 1900s it was the fashionable form of the dish in American households — the Waldorf salad, apples and celery bound with mayonnaise, is generally traced to the Waldorf hotel in New York in that same decade and is usually credited to its maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky. Salads of this kind are often said to have depended on two things that were new to middle-class kitchens: cheap winter citrus, and candied fruit and blanched almonds available from grocers rather than only at holidays. That a recipe scaled for twelve arrives credited to a named contributor, Mrs Thomas K. Gray, suggests a company dish — this is a ladies' luncheon salad, meant to be seen as much as eaten, which is why so much of the instruction concerns garnish and arrangement rather than method.