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Grape-Fruit Salad
Cut the grape-fruit in halves and remove the pulp, being careful to get none of the tough white skin. Mix with bananas and oranges get none of the tough white skin. Mix with bananas and oranges and stir in white Mayonnaise dressing. Remove all skin from the inside of the grapefruit and fill with the mixture, heaping it high and ornamenting with maraschino cherries. Lay each half in a bed of lettuce leaves and serve.
A fruit salad served in the hollowed grapefruit shell, from the era when mayonnaise on fruit was the mark of a fashionable luncheon. The text has a typesetter's stutter — the phrase about the tough white skin is printed twice — so read it as a single instruction.
- White Mayonnaise dressingIn books of this period the term may mean a plain mayonnaise kept pale, sometimes lightened with whipped cream, so it does not tint the fruit; the recipe does not define it. No quantity is given; about half a cup of dressing folded through the fruit from two grapefruit is enough to coat without drowning.
- Sectioning the grapefruitThe hinge of the dish is getting the pulp out clean. Halve the fruit, run a grapefruit or paring knife around the inside wall, then cut along both sides of each membrane wall and lift the segments out whole. Any pith or membrane left clinging turns the whole salad bitter.
- Emptying the shellsAfter the segments are out, scrape the remaining membrane and pith from the inside of each half with a spoon so you are left with a smooth cup. Trim a thin slice off the base if the halves rock on the plate.
- The fruit mixtureTwo grapefruit, two oranges peeled and sectioned, and two bananas make four filled halves. Slice the bananas last and fold them in just before serving; they brown and go soft quickly once dressed.
- Maraschino cherriesModern maraschino cherries are bright red and syrupy, not the older bitter-almond-flavoured Italian kind. Drain them well and pat dry or the syrup will bleed pink streaks through the pale dressing.
- ServingYields four halves, each one portion as a first course or luncheon salad. Chill the filled shells no more than half an hour — longer and the citrus weeps and thins the dressing.
Grapefruit was a novelty turned status fruit in America between about 1890 and the 1920s: Florida groves expanded rapidly, and the fruit moved from curiosity to standard hotel breakfast course, usually halved and sugared. Cookbooks of the period, this one included, then pushed it into the salad chapter, where the empty half-shell made a ready-made serving cup. The pairing of fruit with mayonnaise looks odd now but was entirely conventional then — the American fruit salad grew out of the mayonnaise-dressed "composed" salads of the late nineteenth century. The fruit is generally traced to a natural cross between the sweet orange and the shaddock, or pomelo, in the West Indies; the name itself is usually explained by the way the fruit hangs in clusters on the tree.