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Grape Fruit Salad
Peel the fruit, separate the sections, remove the skin and take out the seeds.
Blanch Malaga grapes by throwing into hot water for a minute, cut in two and remove the seeds. Mix with the grape fruit and serve with mayonnaise. Garnish with lettuce and celery.-Mrs Cornelius Stevenson, Philadelphia.
A late-Victorian luncheon salad that depends almost entirely on knife work: the fruit must be stripped of every trace of membrane before it meets the dressing.
- Sectioning the grapefruit"Remove the skin" means the tough membrane around each segment, not the peel. Cut away peel and white pith with a knife, then cut each section free from the dividing walls, working over a bowl to catch the juice.
- Malaga grapesLarge, firm, seeded green table grapes shipped from Spain, once sold packed in cork. Red or green seedless grapes are the practical stand-in; halve them and skip the seeding, though a brief dip in hot water still loosens the skins if you want them peeled.
- BlanchingThe minute in hot water most likely serves to loosen the skins, though the recipe itself does not say to peel the grapes. Longer than that and they soften and weep, which thins the dressing.
- Drain the fruitGrapefruit sections hold a great deal of juice. Let them sit in a sieve for ten minutes before dressing, or the mayonnaise will thin and run on the plate.
- The mayonnaisePeriod taste put mayonnaise on fruit without apology. A modern palate usually prefers it lightened -- folded with an equal part of whipped cream, or replaced with a cooked boiled dressing; both appear in books of this era.
- GarnishLettuce here would usually mean whole cup-shaped leaves used as a bed rather than shredded greens. The celery may be cut in fine curls or short julienne, adding the crunch the fruit lacks.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities; roughly two grapefruit and about a cup of grapes would serve four as a first course or luncheon salad. Assemble it just before serving; it does not hold.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty on American tables when this book was compiled -- commercial Florida groves only became significant in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and the fruit was often written as two words, "grape fruit"; the usual explanation for the name is that the fruit grows in clusters, though that account is not certain. Its arrival coincided with a vogue for fruit salads bound with mayonnaise. Malaga grapes, associated with the Spanish port of that name, were among the common winter table grapes of the period, sold with their seeds and so needing the blanching and halving described here.