Orange Salad
Marinate eight oranges cut in slices with French dressing. Season highly with cayenne. Serve on water cress. Orange Salad No. 2 Cut thin round slices of orange without removing skin ; arrange in layers in salad bowl. Serve on bed of water cress, and marinate with French dressing.
Orange Salad No. 3 Cut six oranges in halves, take out the pulp, and remove veins and sections. To the pulp add one fourth cup powdered sugar, one fourth cup chopped mint, and two tablespoons each of wine, lemon juice and orange juice. Serve in champagne glasses, and garnish with one red cherry and a bit of angelica.
Three variations on the same idea, two savory and one a dessert cup. The savory versions depend entirely on the dressing and the pepper, since there is nothing else in the bowl.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn 1907 this is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together; period recipes vary, with proportions running from roughly two to three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange-colored bottled dressing sold under that name today, which would make the salad cloying.
- "Season highly with cayenne"The heat is the point of No. 1 — it is what keeps sliced orange from reading as dessert. Start with about a quarter teaspoon for eight oranges and work up; cayenne blooms in oil and will taste stronger after the salad sits.
- Peel and slice cleanlyFor No. 1, cut away peel and all white pith with a knife rather than pulling the fruit apart, then slice crosswise into rounds. Pith is bitter and will fight the vinegar.
- No. 2 leaves the skin onThe recipe is explicit that the peel stays on the rounds. Modern thick-skinned navels are unpleasant this way; use a thin-skinned variety and slice as close to translucent as your knife allows.
- Oranges have changedOranges vary -- If your fruit is very sweet, lean toward more vinegar and more cayenne, or use blood oranges, which keep some edge.
- Marinate brieflyTwenty to thirty minutes in the dressing is enough. Left longer the slices weep and the watercress under them collapses.
- The wine in No. 3 is unspecifiedA sweet sherry, Madeira or a light white wine all suit; the original gives no guidance. Two tablespoons across six oranges' worth of pulp is a background note, not a flavor.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, bright green and once standard for garnish, is now a specialty item. Candied citrus peel or a mint leaf stands in for the color.
- YieldNo. 1's eight oranges serve six to eight as a side salad; No. 2 gives no quantity. No. 3 fills about six coupes or small glasses; champagne saucers are not required.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer — one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by food firms as advertising that happened to be genuinely useful. That a general cookbook could offer three orange salads without comment says a good deal about the period, when oranges were plentiful enough that a hostess could slice eight of them at a time. The pairing of orange with cayenne and watercress belongs to the Edwardian fashion for fruit in the savory course, where sharpness and pepper were used to keep sweet fruit on the correct side of the menu. No. 3 abandons the pretense entirely and serves the fruit sugared, minted and wine-laced in a champagne glass.