Orange Salad
Peel and break the oranges into sections. Mix with celery or pineapple, as preferred, and serve with mayonnaise.
Three lines is all the original gives, which means the cook is expected to supply proportion, timing and judgment. The points below fill in what a 1911 kitchen took for granted.
- Segment, don't just section"break into sections" most likely means pulling apart the natural segments by hand. For a cleaner plate, cut away peel and white pith with a knife and lift out the segments between the membranes, working over a bowl to catch the juice.
- Drain before dressingCitrus and pineapple both shed a lot of liquid, and that liquid will slacken mayonnaise into a pale runny pool within minutes. Drain the fruit well and dress it only at the moment of serving.
- The mayonnaise meant hereIn 1911 mayonnaise for a dish like this was usually made at home from raw yolks, oil and vinegar or lemon, though bottled commercial mayonnaise was beginning to appear on the American market by then. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and works perfectly well; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this dish is cooked.
- Celery or pineappleCelery means the crisp inner ribs cut fine, not the leaves. Pineapple at this date may well have been canned in syrup; fresh pineapple is far more acidic and should be cut small and drained hard.
- ProportionA workable ratio is roughly equal volumes of orange and celery, or two parts orange to one part pineapple, with dressing added by the spoonful rather than poured on.
- ServingFruit salads of this kind were often sent out on a crisp lettuce leaf as an individual plate, chilled, as a first course or alongside cold poultry, though the recipe itself says nothing of this. Four oranges with a head's worth of inner celery ribs will serve four to six.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), written by a man born into slavery in Tennessee who went on to cook in Chicago restaurants, for the Pullman Palace Car Company, and later for the subsidiary of a steel company — one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef. The fruit-and-mayonnaise salad it records was a fashion of exactly that moment: mayonnaise had become a marker of refinement on American tables, refrigerated rail cars were moving Florida and California citrus north in quantity, and canned Hawaiian pineapple was newly cheap and ubiquitous. Combinations that now read oddly — sweet fruit under a savory egg-and-oil dressing — were the height of hotel and dining-car style, and Estes, who cooked for railroad passengers, would have plated many of them.<caution/>