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Egg-Plant Salad
Egg-plant, one lemon, one tablespoonful of oil.
Boil the egg-plant until tender; peel and cut into small pieces; add the juice of a lemon, one tablespoonful of oil. Mix well and serve. Grape Fruit en-Mayonnaise.
Two heads of lettuce, grape fruit, French dressing, mayonnaise dressing. Wash and dry the lettuce, and make a nest in the salad bowl; sprinkle over it the French dressing. Peel the grape fruit and separate into sections; split the membrane so that the pulp of the fruit can be extracted; separate into small bits and place in the prepared nest. Cover with a mayonnaise dressing and put away in a cool place.
Two salads run together on one page: a plain boiled eggplant salad and a grapefruit-and-lettuce composition. Both are underseasoned by modern standards and both need a note on handling.
- Quantities left openThe eggplant is given as "egg-plant" with no weight. One medium globe eggplant, about 1 lb, yields roughly 2 cups of cooked flesh and takes the juice of one lemon and a tablespoon of oil comfortably. That serves two as a side.
- Salt is missingNeither ingredient list gives salt or pepper (though the French dressing and mayonnaise of the second salad carry their own). Boiled eggplant dressed only with lemon and oil tastes flat; salt the dressing generously and add black pepper, and consider a little garlic, as in the Mediterranean cooked-eggplant salads this closely resembles.
- Boiling versus roastingBoiling a whole eggplant until tender takes 20 minutes or more, or 8-10 minutes for thick slices, and gives a watery, mild result. Drain the cooked flesh in a colander and press out the liquid before dressing, or the oil and lemon will slide off. Roasting or grilling gives more flavour but is a different dish from the one written.
- Modern eggplant is not bitterOlder recipes often assumed a bitter, seedy fruit that wanted salting and pressing. Cultivars sold today are generally bred against bitterness, so pre-salting, where an older book asks for it, is optional. This recipe does not ask for it at all.
- The oil"Oil" in a salad recipe of this period usually means olive oil, though cottonseed and other "salad oils" were also on sale. Use a fruity olive oil here; a neutral oil leaves the salad tasting only of lemon.
- Grapefruit sectionsThe instruction to split the membrane and extract the pulp is the old way of supreming. Cut the peel and white pith away with a knife, then cut each segment free of its membranes; working over a bowl saves the juice, which is worth adding to the French dressing.
- Two dressings, one saladThe lettuce is dressed with French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper) and the fruit is masked with mayonnaise. Dress the lettuce at the last moment; the vinaigrette wilts it within minutes.
- "Put away in a cool place"Written when a cool place meant a larder or an icebox rather than a mechanical refrigerator. Half an hour in the fridge is plenty, and no longer than an hour if the mayonnaise is homemade with raw egg.
Both dishes sit at the edges of what an English-speaking cook of the early twentieth century considered salad. The eggplant version follows the same formula as the Mediterranean and Levantine cooked-eggplant salads -- eggplant dressed with lemon and oil -- that survive today as Turkish patl dotless can salatas a and and Greek melitzanosalata, here without their garlic. The grapefruit salad marks a different novelty. Grapefruit was still a relatively recent commercial crop in the United States, with Florida plantings expanding in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and it appears in period cookery mostly as a breakfast half-fruit or as exactly this sort of chilled composition, a fruit laid in a lettuce nest and masked with mayonnaise. The pairing of sweet fruit with mayonnaise strikes many readers now as strange, but it was a mainstay of respectable American salad-making for decades.