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Malaga Grape Salad
Cut the grapes endwise and take out the seeds. Mix with oranges and blanched almonds, and serve with either the mayonnaise or the boiled dressing.
A three-ingredient assembly that depends entirely on the fruit being cold, dry and neatly cut. The original assumes a seeded grape and a homemade dressing, neither of which is a given now.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm, greenish-amber seeded grape, once shipped from Spain and later grown heavily in California; it is uncommon in supermarkets today. Any large, crisp seedless grape stands in, in which case the cutting and seeding step is just halving them lengthwise.
- Why endwiseCutting stem-to-tip rather than across gives two long halves that hold their shape in the bowl and expose the seed cavity for picking out.
- The orangesCut into segments free of membrane and let them drain a few minutes before mixing, or the juice thins the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the dish. Two medium oranges to about a pound of grapes is a reasonable proportion.
- Blanched almondsWhole blanched almonds are sold ready; to do it yourself, pour boiling water over shelled almonds, stand one minute, and slip the skins off. Slivered or coarsely chopped is easier to eat, and a few minutes in a 350F oven improves the flavour without changing the recipe.
- MayonnaiseA period mayonnaise is raw yolk and oil, made to order. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and works here; thin it with a spoonful of orange juice or cream so it coats the fruit rather than clumping.
- Boiled dressingThe alternative offered is a cooked dressing, typically egg, vinegar, sugar and milk or cream, thickened over heat like a thin custard; period versions vary and often add mustard, butter or a little flour. It is sharper and less rich than mayonnaise, and better suited to fruit; make it ahead and chill it thoroughly.
- Assembly and yieldAssembly -- Dress at the last moment, on chilled plates or a lettuce leaf. The original gives no quantities, so the yield depends entirely on how much fruit you cut.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), the cookbook of a man born into slavery in Tennessee who became a Pullman dining-car cook and later cooked for the executives of a Chicago steel company. Fruit salads dressed with mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing were a fashionable novelty in the first decade of the twentieth century, and they appear in hotel and railway dining rooms of the period, where refrigeration and long-distance shipping had made out-of-season fruit a marker of a good table. The Malaga grape itself takes its name from the Andalusian port it was exported through; by Estes's day a good deal of the American supply is thought to have come from the San Joaquin Valley, where the variety was planted widely before seedless grapes displaced it. The almonds and oranges suggest the same world of long-distance shipping in which Estes cooked.