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Fruit and Nut Salad
1/2 cup English walnuts Juice of 1/2 lemon Lettuce French dressing Slice the bananas and oranges and mix them with the nuts and lemon juice. Serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing.
A three-minute fruit salad from the era when fruit on lettuce with a sharp dressing was considered a proper first-course salad rather than dessert.
- ProportionsThe quantities of banana and orange are missing from the text as it survives; only the half cup of walnuts is specified. Two bananas and two oranges is a reasonable guess, and nothing here needs to balance precisely.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the native American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the fruit. Toast them briefly in a dry pan if you want more from them than texture.
- OrangesThe recipe says only to slice them; segmenting over a bowl and cutting away the membrane gives a cleaner result than cutting crosswise through the pith.
- The lemon juiceIt is there to keep the banana from browning, so toss the slices in it immediately and do not let the salad sit more than about twenty minutes before serving.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and paprika or pepper — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Keep it lean, since the fruit supplies the sweetness.
- ServingWhole cup-shaped inner leaves of iceberg or butter lettuce hold the fruit best. Dress at the table or the leaves collapse.
Fruit-and-nut salads on lettuce were common in American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s, and they sit alongside two developments: the salad course had become fashionable in middle-class households, and improvements in refrigerated shipping and rail transport had made bananas and Florida and California citrus more widely and cheaply available in northern cities. Mrs. Fryer's was a loose-leaf book.