Home › Salads › Philadelphia Salad
Philadelphia Salad
Peel and dice one grapefruit, cut in halves and seed a cup of grapes, dice one orange, shred a pineapple, and mix with half a cup of English walnuts and cream nuts. Place all in a bowl, and pour over French dressing. Garnish with endive.
A fruit salad of the sort that filled the salad chapter of American cookbooks a century ago, dressed not with a sweet cream dressing but with a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing. Two ingredient names need translating before you shop.
- Cream nutsAn old American market name for Brazil nuts, sold that way well into the twentieth century. Buy them shelled and slice them lengthwise; the recipe's half cup covers the walnuts and cream nuts together, so use roughly a quarter cup of each.
- French dressing, 1914 senseFrench dressing, in the older sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled product. It means roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice, shaken with salt and pepper — about 6 tablespoons total is plenty for this quantity.
- EndiveIn American books of this date the word usually means curly endive or chicory, what is now sold as frisée. Belgian endive works and looks tidier; either way it is a bitter foil to the fruit, not a bed of lettuce.
- "Shred a pineapple"One small fresh pineapple, or half a large one — cored and cut into thin strips rather than chunks. Canned pineapple in juice, well drained, is an honest substitute but gives a softer salad.
- Segment the citrus properlySegment the citrus -- The recipe says only "peel and dice," but it is worth cutting the segments free of the membrane first and then cutting them across; grapefruit membrane left in is tough and bitter against the rest of the fruit.
- GrapesWritten for seeded grapes, hence the halving and seeding. Seedless grapes need only be halved.
- Drain and dress lateCitrus and pineapple shed a great deal of juice. Drain the cut fruit before it goes in the bowl, or the dressing thins to nothing; dress within a few minutes of serving.
- YieldFour to six as a salad course, two or three as a light meatless lunch with bread and cheese.
Salads like this belong to the era when American cookbooks were dividing salads into "vegetable" and "fruit," and when a fruit salad was still a slightly modish thing to put on a table — the ingredients depended on a railway and refrigeration network that could put Florida grapefruit and Hawaiian pineapple in a Northern bowl in winter. City names attached to salads were often marketing, borrowing prestige as much as recording an origin — though the Waldorf is a real exception, traceable to the Waldorf hotel and associated with Oscar Tschirky in the 1890s — and the same title can cover quite different combinations from book to book. Nut meats, meanwhile, do the work that meat would otherwise do, being rich, oily and filling enough to carry a course on their own.