Home › Salads › Apple and Grape Salad
Apple and Grape Salad
Pare apples and dice them. Wash the grapes, cut them in two and remove the stones. Mix the fruit and serve on lettuce leaves. Moisten with French dressing.
A three-line fruit salad that assumes you already know the proportions and the dressing. A few decisions are left entirely to the cook.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given. Equal volumes of diced apple and halved grapes works well: about 2 medium apples to 2 cups of grapes serves four.
- Grapes with stonesThe instruction to halve and seed reflects the seeded table grapes common before seedless varieties dominated. Modern seedless grapes need only be halved, and small ones not even that.
- ApplesChoose a firm, tart variety that holds its shape and does not go mealy in dressing. Toss the dice with a little lemon juice as you cut to keep them from browning, since the recipe has you mixing before dressing.
- French dressing, 1910s senseFrench dressing, period sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled kind. It means a simple vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper; period sources vary in the ratio, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken just before use.
- Moisten, not dressFruit sheds liquid and a full dressing turns the salad watery; add just enough to gloss the cut surfaces and serve at once.
- The lettuceWhole cupped leaves used as a base rather than shredded greens. Iceberg or butterhead cups both do the job; keep them cold and dry so the dressing does not pool.
Fruit salads on lettuce with an oil-and-vinegar dressing were a fixture of American cookery from the 1890s onward, when the salad course expanded well beyond greens and the combination of sweet fruit with a sharp dressing came to seem refreshing rather than odd. The dish sits easily in a meatless cookbook: a salad course that needed no stock, no gelatine and no cooking at all filled the gap left by the meat dish.