Orange Salad
Mix a cup of pecan nuts and English walnuts with a cup of diced oranges, squeeze lemon juice over them, and let them stand for half an hour. Serve very cold with endive and French dressing.
A four-line salad that depends almost entirely on how the oranges are cut and how cold everything is. The nuts are meant to be a full equal partner in volume, not a garnish.
- Proportions and yieldA cup of nuts to a cup of orange reads nut-heavy to modern eyes, though the wording may mean a cup of the two nuts together rather than a cup of each. It makes roughly two to three side servings; doubling the orange gives a lighter salad if you want it as a first course.
- Diced orangesCut the oranges into supremes first, membrane and pith removed, then dice. Wheels of unpeeled segments will shed pith and turn the dressing bitter.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, named to distinguish it from the American black walnut, which is far stronger and would bully the citrus. Use ordinary walnut halves, and toast neither them nor the pecans -- raw is what the recipe expects.
- The half-hour standThe recipe gives no reason for it; the lemon juice sharpens the sweet orange and the rest is macerating time. Do it in the refrigerator, not on the counter, since the salad is to be served very cold.
- EndiveIn American books of this period "endive" usually means curly endive or frisée rather than Belgian endive. Either works; frisée gives the intended bitter frill against the sweet fruit.
- French dressingIn American usage of this period this is a plain vinaigrette -- oil and acid in something like two or three to one, with salt and pepper, and often a little paprika or mustard; not the sweetened, ketchup-tinted bottled dressing of later decades. Dress at the table, since the oranges have already given up juice.
- Serve very coldChill the plates and the greens as well. The salad has no starch or dairy to hold it together, so temperature is the only thing keeping it crisp.
Fruit-and-nut salads over greens were a fixture of American cookery from the 1890s through the 1920s, made possible by refrigerated rail cars bringing Florida and California citrus to northern tables in winter, and by the rise of the salad course in middle-class dining. In a meatless cookbook the combination does double duty: nuts were the standard vegetarian substitute for meat protein in this era, promoted heavily by Seventh-day Adventist and Battle Creek-influenced writers, so a cup of pecans and walnuts is doing the work a slice of cold beef would have done elsewhere on the menu. Later orange-and-nut salads were often bound with mayonnaise or whipped cream; this one is a sparer formula, relying on lemon juice and cold alone.