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Grape-Fruit and Pineapple Salad
Cut the grape-fruit in half and remove the pulp with a spoon, being careful to get none of the tough white skin. Mix with fresh careful to get none of the tough white skin. Mix with fresh or canned pineapple and serve on crisp lettuce leaves, covered with white Mayonnaise dressing.
A two-ingredient fruit salad that depends entirely on how cleanly the grapefruit is broken down. The instruction that matters is the one about the white skin: leave any membrane on and the whole dish turns bitter and stringy.
- Sectioning the fruitScooping with a spoon is easiest on a very ripe fruit. It is often faster to cut away peel and pith with a knife, then cut each segment free of its membranes over a bowl to catch the juice.
- Drain before dressingGrapefruit and pineapple both shed a lot of liquid. Let the mixed fruit sit in a sieve for ten minutes, or the mayonnaise will slide off into a pink puddle on the plate.
- "White Mayonnaise"This most likely indicates a pale mayonnaise, made with lemon juice rather than vinegar and without mustard or paprika, so that it does not discolour the fruit. Period books also record mayonnaise lightened with a little whipped cream, which suits fruit well.
- Raw eggMayonnaise made at home from scratch is uncooked. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, or use a good bottled mayonnaise.
- Fresh versus canned pineappleCanned pineapple is sweeter and softer; the recipe permits either. Fresh pineapple is sharper and needs to be fully ripe; core it and cut it into pieces no larger than the grapefruit segments.
- Proportions and yieldThe original gives none. Equal volumes of grapefruit and pineapple is the usual balance; one large grapefruit and about a cup of pineapple dresses four salad plates.
- ServingChill fruit and lettuce separately and assemble at the last moment. Lettuce wilts within minutes under acidic fruit and dressing.
Fruit-and-mayonnaise salads were popular in American cookery when this book was compiled, and this one draws on two supply lines: Florida grapefruit, which moved from curiosity toward a breakfast staple in the early twentieth century, and Hawaiian canned pineapple, which by the 1910s was widely stocked and comparatively cheap. Acidic fruit with a rich egg dressing on a lettuce leaf was common luncheon fare, often served as a separate salad course.