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Salad
2 cupfuls diced tart apples 1/2 cupful white grapes Pulp I grape fruit 3 diced bananas French dressing Lettuce leaves Mix the apples with the pulp of the grape fruit, add the bananas, and mix with the French dressing.
A plain early twentieth-century fruit salad in which the dressing is oil and vinegar, not mayonnaise or anything sweet. The ingredient list mentions lettuce leaves the method never uses.
- Assemble the lettuce yourselfThe instructions stop at mixing. Line individual plates or a shallow bowl with crisp lettuce leaves and spoon the fruit over them at the last minute, which is what the ingredient list intends.
- Grapefruit pulpThis means the segments freed from their membranes, worked over a bowl so the juice is caught and goes into the salad. One grapefruit yields roughly a cup of segments.
- White grapesPeriod "white" grapes were green table grapes, often seeded, though seedless varieties such as Thompson were already widely grown; halve and seed them if necessary. With modern seedless grapes, halving is still worth doing so they do not roll off the fork. Note that the method, like the lettuce, never says where the grapes go.
- BrowningApples and bananas both discolour within minutes. Toss the diced apple in the grapefruit juice as you cut it, and add the bananas last, immediately before dressing and serving.
- French dressing of the periodUsually about three parts oil to one of vinegar or lemon juice, with salt and often paprika, shaken until cloudy; sugar and herbs were not typical, though some period versions do include mustard. Use a light oil so it does not overwhelm the fruit; roughly 1/4 cup should dress this quantity.
- Tart applesGranny Smith, Braeburn or any firm acid apple. A sweet modern eating apple leaves the salad flat against the oily dressing.
- YieldAbout four to six servings as a first course or an accompaniment to cold meat.
Fruit salads dressed with oil and vinegar rather than cream or mayonnaise were a fixture of American cookery from the 1890s through the 1920s, when grapefruit shifted from a Florida curiosity to a fashionable breakfast and luncheon fruit and bananas had become cheap enough for everyday use through year-round steamship imports. The lettuce leaf underneath is often taken as a marker of the era: a salad was expected to arrive on greens whether or not anyone ate them, and the arrangement mattered as much as the flavour.