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French Fruit Salad
Remove the skin and seeds from one cup of white grapes. Cut three bananas in cubes and cover immediately with lemon juice. Remove the skin and white from six oranges and cut in small pieces. Mix with mayonnaise; arrange in nests of white lettuce leaves, or serve in halves of oranges. Garnish with mayonnaise dressing.
A straightforward turn-of-the-century fruit salad; the only surprise for modern cooks is the dressing. A few notes on the ingredients and on what to do about the mayonnaise.
- White grapesThis means green table grapes, seeded and skinned. Seedless varieties now dominate, so skip the seeding; skinning is optional and mostly a matter of texture, though it does give the pale, uniform look the recipe is after.
- The "white" of the orangesThat is the pith and the membrane between segments. Cutting away the peel deeply enough to expose the flesh, then sectioning between the membranes, gets you there faster than peeling by hand.
- Lemon juice on the bananasNot a flavoring but an anti-browning step, and it works only if the cubes are coated as they are cut. Toss them in a bowl with the juice rather than sprinkling it over the top.
- Mayonnaise on fruitThis is period practice, not an error. Modern commercial mayonnaise may taste sharper on fruit than the dressings a 1907 cook would have made; folding in whipped cream to lighten it is a documented period option, though the recipe itself calls for plain mayonnaise and specifies no proportions.
- TimingAssemble close to serving. Cut oranges shed juice, which thins the dressing and pools in the lettuce; bananas soften within an hour no matter how well they are acidulated.
- Serving in orange halvesIf you take this option, halve and hollow the oranges before sectioning the flesh, and reserve six halves for cups. Cutting a thin slice off the base keeps them from tipping on the plate.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly six servings, in lettuce nests or orange cups, as a first course or luncheon salad.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — one of many cookbooks issued by food companies in the period to put their product in American kitchens, though the salad chapter has nothing to sell. Why "French" is unclear, since the dressing here is mayonnaise rather than a French dressing. The fashion for fruit bound with mayonnaise ran through hotel and ladies'-luncheon cookery from around the 1890s into the 1930s, after which such salads increasingly gave way to the congealed and marshmallow-strewn kind. Oranges and bananas both appear here as everyday items, which they had only recently become: refrigerated rail transport and the growth of the banana steamship trade made citrus and bananas far cheaper in northern cities within a generation, and cookbooks of the 1900s use them with a freedom that a book from the 1870s could not.