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Sweet Grape Fruit Salad
Use same ingredients as for Grape Fruit Salad, substituting wine dressing for mayonnaise.
A one-line variation that leans entirely on the recipe above it: the same fruit, dressed with wine dressing instead of mayonnaise. Almost everything worth saying concerns the two components it names but does not describe.
- "Grape fruit" as two wordsCookbooks of this period commonly spelled it as two words. The base salad it refers to is not reproduced here; grapefruit sections were the usual foundation, sometimes with other fruit.
- What a wine dressing wasIn books of this period a wine dressing generally means an oil-and-acid dressing in which sherry, Madeira or a light white wine replaces some or all of the vinegar, often sweetened. It is sweet-tart rather than creamy, which appears to be the point of the substitution. No proportions are given here; consult the book's own dressing recipe.
- Why the swap changes the dishMayonnaise on grapefruit reads as a first-course salad; a sweet wine dressing pushes the same ingredients in a sweeter direction. Serve it cold, in glasses or on chilled plates.
- Sweetness has movedThe grapefruit grown commercially in 1907 were seedy and sharp, of the Duncan type; Ruby Red and modern pink varieties are markedly sweeter, so go lighter on any sugar in the dressing and taste before adding more.
- Sectioning mattersCut away every scrap of the white membrane between segments; it is bitter and it holds dressing badly. Work over a bowl and add the caught juice to the dressing rather than to the salad, where it will thin everything.
- Dress at the last momentGrapefruit sheds juice steadily once cut. A salad dressed more than a few minutes ahead sits in a pool of diluted dressing.
- YieldFigure one grapefruit for two servings as a light course, three if it is part of a fruit salad with other ingredients.
- A modern caveatGrapefruit interferes with a long list of common prescription drugs, statins among them. Worth knowing before serving it to guests without asking.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of the era it ranged well beyond the product it was meant to sell. Grapefruit appears in it as a fashionable novelty: commercial groves in Florida had only expanded seriously in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the 1900s the fruit was showing up on hotel menus and in salad chapters as a mark of an up-to-date table. Fruit salads dressed with mayonnaise strike modern readers as odd, but the boiled and oil-based dressings of the period were routinely sweetened and used across the whole range from vegetable to fruit; offering a wine dressing as an alternative was simply a way of giving the same ingredients a sweeter cast. The habit of writing a variation as a single cross-referenced line was standard practice of the period.