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Grapefruit and Date Salad
Mix equal amounts of grapefruit and dates. Marinate for 15 minutes in French dressing. Then add enough of the following dressing to moisten it well: one-half cup grape juice and 4 tablespoons powdered sugar to one cup whipped cream.
A fruit salad in the older American sense: sweet fruit dressed twice, first with a sharp vinaigrette and then with a sweetened whipped-cream dressing. The instructions assume a cook who knows the conventions of the period, so a few things need spelling out.
- French dressing, 1930s styleNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold today. It means a plain vinaigrette of roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice, with salt and paprika. Made with today's bottled French dressing the salad becomes cloying.
- Preparing the grapefruitCut the fruit into supremes, free of membrane and pith, and drain them well before mixing. Excess juice will thin both dressings and leave a puddle in the bowl.
- The datesUse whole dried dates, pitted and sliced or quartered rather than chopped fine; pre-chopped sugar-rolled dates are too sweet against the grapefruit. Medjool are softer and sweeter than the Deglet Noor a period cook would have had.
- Fold, do not stirWhip the cream to soft peaks, fold in the sugar, then fold in the grape juice a little at a time. Poured in all at once the liquid will slacken the cream and it may separate.
- Drain before dressingAfter the 15-minute marinade, lift the fruit out and let the vinaigrette drain away. Oil and vinegar carried into the whipped dressing can curdle it.
- Proportions and yieldProportions -- The cream dressing as written -- one cup cream, half a cup grape juice, 4 tablespoons powdered sugar -- is likely to make more than a modest bowl of fruit needs. The recipe says to add only enough to moisten well, and gives no yield.
- ServingAssemble and dress at the last moment, on chilled plates, on a crisp lettuce leaf if you want the period presentation. Held in the refrigerator, the fruit weeps and the dressing tends to separate.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty on American tables in this period: commercial groves in Florida and Texas expanded rapidly through the first decades of the twentieth century, and the fruit moved from a curiosity to a fashionable first course and salad ingredient. Dates, shipped dried from North Africa and the Middle East and later grown in the Coachella Valley, were a standard pantry sweet. The double dressing here -- a savoury vinaigrette followed by a sweetened whipped cream -- is characteristic of the era's salad course, which sat somewhere between vegetable dish and dessert, and which cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s produced in great variety.