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Sour Orange Salad
This salad is especially nice to serve with roasted wild duck or woodcock. Peel and cut in slices four sour oranges, arrange on lettuce leaves, cover with Mayonnaise dressing and serve.
Three lines and two ingredients, but the whole thing rests on finding the right orange. Everything else is assembly.
- What a sour orange isThe sour or bitter orange is Citrus × aurantium, sold as Seville orange and, in Latin and Caribbean markets, as naranja agria. It is not an underripe sweet orange, and substituting one gives you a bland salad with no point to it.
- If you cannot get themSour oranges have a short winter season, roughly January into March. Failing them, sliced sweet oranges sharpened with a squeeze of lime, or blood oranges, come closest in effect; grapefruit segments also work against rich game.
- Peel to the fleshBitter oranges have thick pith that is genuinely unpleasant raw. Cut the top and bottom flat, then pare the peel and white layer away in strips with a knife rather than pulling it off by hand, and slice crosswise into rounds about a quarter inch thick.
- Pick out the seedsSour orange varieties are heavily seeded. Flick the pips out of each round as you slice; nobody wants to negotiate them under mayonnaise.
- The dressingThe recipe says only "Mayonnaise dressing." Some period fruit-salad mayonnaises were thinned with a little cream. A thick modern jarred mayonnaise sits on citrus like paste, so loosen it with cream or a spoonful of the orange juice before spooning it over.
- Why duckThe acid is doing the work of a sauce. Bitter orange cuts the fat of roast duck the same way a bigarade sauce does, which is the sound instinct behind the pairing.
- Yield and timingFour oranges would make a side salad for roughly four to six, though the recipe gives no yield. Slice and dress it immediately before it goes to the table; juice pools and the lettuce collapses quickly.
The sour orange reached Europe from Asia well before the sweet orange did, and for centuries in English and French cooking "orange" in a savoury context meant the bitter kind — the fruit behind orange marmalade, curaçao, and the classical sauce bigarade served with duck. By the period this book seems to belong to, sweet oranges from Florida and California had likely come to dominate the American fruit stand and the sour orange had become something of a specialty item, which may be why the recipe bothers to name it. The pairing with wild duck and woodcock places the salad in the game-dinner tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a sharp fruit salad was understood as the correct foil to dark, fatty, strong-flavoured meat. Woodcock is now a regulated migratory game bird in the United States and no longer sold commercially.}