Orange Salad
Peel, cut six oranges into slices and remove the seeds, pour over them Fruit Salad Dressing, No. 2, stand away one or two hours, and serve.
Mandarins may be used in the same manner.
A two-line recipe that depends entirely on a dressing printed elsewhere in the book, and on how you cut the fruit. Both are worth attention.
- The missing dressing"Fruit Salad Dressing, No. 2" is a cross-reference to another page; without it the recipe is incomplete. Fruit-salad dressings in books of this period vary, but often amount to sugar dissolved in citrus juice, sometimes with a spoonful of sherry, maraschino or brandy. Any sweetened citrus syrup of that kind will stand in, though this is a substitution rather than the book's own dressing.
- Cut across the segments"Cut into slices" most likely means crosswise rounds rather than separated segments, though the book does not specify. Cut rounds expose more surface to the dressing. A quarter inch is a workable thickness.
- Take off the pithPeel with a knife rather than by hand, cutting away the white pith along with the skin. The recipe says only "peel" and gives no further direction.
- SeedsRemoving seeds was necessary work with the oranges of the period. Modern navel oranges and most supermarket mandarins are seedless, so this step usually disappears.
- The standing timeThe one to two hours' standing is the point of the dish: the fruit gives up juice and the dressing loosens into a syrup. The recipe says only "stand away" and does not specify a cold place, nor an upper limit.
- YieldSix oranges serve four to six as a salad course or a light dessert, with the accumulated syrup spooned over. The recipe gives no serving temperature.
Orange salad belongs to a moment when a "salad" was often understood as something dressed and served cold, so that a sweetened citrus dish could be as legitimate a candidate as lettuce. Dishes of this kind required no fire at a time when cooking meant a coal range heating the whole house, and oranges — shipped in quantity from Florida, the Mediterranean and the West Indies by the last quarter of the century — had become cheap enough to buy by the half-dozen. The mention of mandarins as an alternative is a small marker of that trade, the smaller loose-skinned citrus having arrived in American and British markets over the course of the nineteenth century.