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Bermuda Salad
On a bed of lettuce arrange 2 very thin slices Bermuda onion, and on the onion lay 1/2-inch thick slice pared orange. Continue with another slice onion and a second slice of orange. Garnish with pimola cut in slices and a sprig of watercress. Serve with French dressing.
An assembled salad rather than a cooked one, so the whole thing rests on how the onion and orange are cut. The quantities given make one individual serving.
- Bermuda onionA large, mild, flat sweet onion, pale yellow or white. Vidalia, Walla Walla, Maui or any labelled sweet onion stands in; a standard yellow storage onion will overwhelm the fruit.
- Very thin means very thinSlice the onion crosswise on a mandoline or with a sharp knife so the rings are translucent, around 1/16 inch. Onion cut too thick is the likeliest thing to unbalance a raw salad like this.
- Taming the biteIf the onion is sharper than expected, soak the slices in ice water for 10 minutes and pat dry; this does not soften the rings.
- Pared orangePare means cutting the peel and all the white pith away with a knife, then slicing the flesh crosswise into rounds about half an inch thick. Navel oranges hold their shape; blood oranges look striking against the onion.
- PimolaA brand-era term for a green olive stuffed with pimiento, sold under the Pimola name. Use any pimiento-stuffed green olive, sliced into rounds.
- French dressingIn American books of this period this means a simple shaken vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Yield and timingAs written this is one salad; multiply by the number at table. Assemble no more than a few minutes before serving, since the orange juice thins the dressing and the watercress wilts.
Sweet onions were shipped to the eastern United States from Bermuda in quantity during the nineteenth century, and "Bermuda onion" stuck as the name for the flat, mild type long after much of the crop was grown in Texas and elsewhere instead. Orange-and-onion salads of this kind belong to the arranged, stacked, garnished style of salad favoured in early twentieth-century American cookbooks rather than to tossed greens; the appeal was visual as much as anything. The pimola, a stuffed olive marketed under that trade name, suggests a date in the first half of the twentieth century.