Fruit Salad
French dressing Juice of 1/2 lemon Lettuce Slice the bananas and oranges and pour the lemon juice over all. Serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing. 2 bananas 2 oranges
A three-ingredient salad from the era when "fruit salad" meant a dressed salad course rather than dessert. Almost everything hinges on what you understand by French dressing.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn a book of this period this is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in American supermarkets, which would overwhelm the fruit.
- The ingredient list runs backwardsThe quantities appear out of order in this transcription. Read it as: 2 bananas, 2 oranges, juice of half a lemon, lettuce, French dressing.
- The lemon juice is doing workIt is there to keep the cut banana from browning, not for flavour alone. Toss the slices in it the moment they are cut, and assemble close to serving; bananas soften and weep within an hour of being dressed.
- Preparing the orangesPeel down to the flesh, removing all white pith, then either slice into rounds or cut the segments free of their membranes. The pith is bitter and the membrane is tough against soft banana.
- LettuceA crisp leaf holds up best under dressing and juice. Butterhead or the inner leaves of a crisphead lettuce, cupped, will serve the fruit as the original intends.
- Dress lightlyA tablespoon or so of vinaigrette per serving, spooned over at the table. Any more and the fruit sits in a puddle.
- Yield and place in the mealEnough for about four small plates. Dressed with vinaigrette and served on lettuce, it reads as a salad course rather than a sweet.
Fruit salads dressed with oil and vinegar and served on lettuce were a standard of American cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the salad course arrived as a light, faintly fashionable interlude and refrigerated rail transport made oranges and bananas ordinary groceries in northern cities rather than winter luxuries. The entry is pared to the bone: the compiler assumed the reader already knew how to make French dressing and needed only the combination. The recipe also suggests something of how the period tended to distinguish salad from dessert, though the line was far from absolute. Sweetened fruit in whipped cream or jelly went at the end of the meal; the same fruit under vinaigrette on a lettuce leaf was a savoury course, and the lemon juice served the practical purpose of keeping the bananas presentable on the plate.