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Grapefruit Salad
1 large grapefruit 2 small green peppers 1 cup celery 1 teaspoon pimiento 1 tablespoon nut meats Cut grapefruit in half, remove skin and cut in sections. Place four sections, cross-shape on bed of lettuce on individual salad plates. Combine finely shredded peppers, discarding seeds, with pimiento, chopped nuts and diced celery. Moisten with French dressing. Place small amount of this mixture in center of each grapefruit cross.
A composed salad of the arranged-on-lettuce school, where the look of the plate matters as much as the eating. Everything hinges on getting clean grapefruit sections.
- Sectioning the fruitHalving first and then peeling is awkward; it is easier to cut off top and bottom, stand the fruit up, slice the peel and white pith away in strips, then cut each segment free from the membrane over a bowl. Membrane left on the sections turns leathery and spoils the cross.
- French dressing meant something elseIn this period French dressing was oil and vinegar, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar though the proportion varies from book to book, shaken with salt, pepper and often paprika. The sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today would fight the grapefruit.
- Green peppersTwo small green bell peppers shredded fine will roughly match or exceed the cup of celery in volume, and raw green pepper is assertive. Taste as you combine and hold some back if it dominates.
- PimientoA teaspoon of the jarred sweet red pepper, drained and chopped, used for color rather than flavor. Roasted red pepper from a jar is the nearest current equivalent.
- Nut meatsOne tablespoon is a garnish quantity, not a component. The recipe does not specify a nut; walnuts or pecans suit it. Toast them briefly to keep them from tasting soft against the crisp celery.
- Assembly and timingDress the pepper-celery mixture only when the plates are going out. Grapefruit sheds juice quickly and a salad built early sits in a pink puddle.
- YieldA large grapefruit gives ten to twelve sections, so four per plate serves two generously or three modestly. Scale the fruit, not the filling, if you need more plates.
Grapefruit came into American kitchens as a modern fruit rather than an inherited one: commercial groves in Florida and later the Rio Grande Valley made it widely available in the early twentieth century, and it arrived with a reputation for being light, sharp and faintly health-conscious, which suited the reducing diets and the breakfast tables of the 1920s and 1930s. This salad belongs to the era's fashion for composed plates, where each portion was built to a pattern on a lettuce leaf instead of being tossed in a bowl, and where a cross, a wheel or a ring of fruit sections counted as design work. The pimiento supplies the one note of red that such plates almost always carried.