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Endive and Grape-Fruit Salad
½ lb. French endive I ripe grape fruit French dressing Paprika I romaine Wash and dry the endive and mix it with the carpels of the grape fruit. Color some French dressing well with paprika, and pour it over the salad at the moment of serving.
Mix well and serve on leaves of romaine, or simply in ramequins without the romaine.
A two-ingredient salad that depends entirely on how the grapefruit is broken down and how sharp the dressing is. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the terms mean something other than what a modern reader assumes.
- French endiveThis is what American markets now sell as Belgian endive or witloof chicory — the pale, tight, torpedo-shaped heads, not curly endive or frisée. 1½ lb is somewhere between six and ten heads depending on size; trim the bitter core out of the base of each before separating the leaves.
- CarpelsThe word means the grapefruit's segments, and the point is that they should be lifted out free of all membrane and pith. Cut the top and bottom off, pare the peel down to the flesh, then cut each section away from the dividing walls. Left-on membrane turns the salad bitter and rubbery.
- French dressingIn a book of this vintage this means plain oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly two to four parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled product that later took the name. The recipe gives no quantity; something around ½ cup should dress this amount.
- Paprika for colorThe paprika is doing visual work rather than adding much heat; it tints the dressing pink against the white endive. Sweet Hungarian paprika gives the best color. Whisk it in and let the dressing stand a few minutes so the color bleeds out.
- RamequinsHere these are small individual dishes — the same little porcelain cups used for baked eggs — not pastry cases. Any small ramekin or shallow bowl serves.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction to pour the dressing on "at the moment of serving" is the hinge. Salted and acidified leaves soften and weep, and grapefruit juice runs freely. Assemble, then dress at the table if you can.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; this quantity would plausibly serve four to six as a first course or alongside a rich main dish. A grapefruit yields roughly a cup of segments, so a second is worth adding if the fruit is small.
Grapefruit was still a relative novelty in American cooking when this book appeared: it moved from Florida groves into northern markets in the last decades of the nineteenth century and by the 1900s was fashionable enough to open a formal meal, halved and sugared. Pairing it with Belgian endive in in Belgian sheds marks this as a salad for a well-supplied household rather than a seasonal one. The paprika-tinted vinaigrette belongs to the same moment, when cooks used paprika as much for the pink blush it gave dressings and cream sauces as for its flavor. Its appearance in a book about casserole cookery is a reminder that a one-dish dinner was still thought to want something cold and sharp beside it.