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Orange and Date Salad
Remove pulp and inner skin from six oranges and 1 grapefruit. Break into small pieces. Mix 1 lb. dates cut into long strips with ½ C nuts cut fine. Serve on lettuce leaf with salad dressing made as follows: 2 egg yolks 1/2 C powdered sugar 1 C orange juice or cooked pineapple juice 1 t cornstarch Cook until it thickens. Add 1 T lemon juice. Chill and thin with whipped cream.
Mrs. Chas. Greenwood.
A fruit salad with a cooked custard dressing, filed under relishes because in 1920s church cookery a sweet fruit salad sat beside the pickles as an accompaniment rather than a dessert. Most of the work is in the segmenting and in not scrambling the yolks.
- "12 C nuts" is a misprintHalf a cup is almost certainly meant; the fraction bar appears to have dropped out in typesetting. Twelve cups of nuts against six oranges would be a bowl of nuts with fruit in it.
- Removing "pulp and inner skin"This means supreming: cut off peel and white pith, then free each segment from the membrane with a knife. Work over a bowl so the juice is caught, since the dressing wants a cup of orange juice anyway.
- GrapefruitA 1920s grapefruit would have been a white variety rather than anything like a modern Ruby Red, which was not commercialised until the 1930s. If using a sweet pink variety the salad will read as noticeably sweeter than intended; a white grapefruit is closer to the original balance.
- The dressing is a stovetop custardWhisk yolks, sugar, cornstarch and juice together cold, then cook over low heat or a double boiler, stirring constantly, until it thickens and coats a spoon — around 170-175F. It will curdle if it boils hard, and the citrus acid makes it less forgiving than a plain custard.
- Cornstarch needs a moment at heatOne teaspoon in a cup of juice thickens lightly; let it bubble gently for a few seconds once thick so the starch loses its raw taste, then pull it off before the yolks tighten.
- Lemon juice and cream go in coldAdd the lemon off the heat, chill thoroughly, then fold in whipped cream to loosen it. Folding cream into warm custard deflates it and you get a thin sauce instead of a dressing.
- Pineapple juice must be cookedThe recipe specifies "cooked pineapple juice"; the usual explanation is bromelain, the protein-digesting enzyme in raw pineapple, which heat destroys. Canned juice is already heat-treated.
- DatesUse whole pitted dates and cut them yourself into strips; pre-chopped dates are usually rolled in oat flour or sugar that muddies the fruit. Medjool are softer and sweeter than the drier dates of the period.
- YieldSix oranges, a grapefruit and a pound of dates make eight to ten salad servings. Dress at the table — the fruit weeps and the cream-loosened custard slackens within half an hour.
Congregational and church-society cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s are full of cooked salad dressings like this one, a boiled custard of yolks, sugar, starch and fruit juice lightened with whipped cream. They belong to an era when commercial mayonnaise was still making its way into home kitchens, and a dressing was often something you stood over a double boiler and made. The fruit itself signals the same period: Florida and California citrus reached the upper Midwest by refrigerated rail by the early 1900s, and packaged California dates were becoming more widely available in the same decades, so a housewife could assemble oranges, grapefruit and a pound of dates in midwinter and have it count as something of a display. If the dish was indeed printed among the pickles and relishes, that reflects how fruit salads were then understood — as a bright, acidic side to a heavy meal rather than a course of its own. The attribution to Mrs. Chas. Greenwood, listed by her husband's initials as was standard, is the usual mark of these community volumes.