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Grapefruit Salad
Mix grapefruit pulp with broken English walnuts, hickory nuts, or pecans. Mix with mayonnaise made without mustard, fill the grapefruit shells, and serve on lettuce.
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A four-line recipe that assumes you know how to break down a grapefruit and how to build a mayonnaise from scratch. The two things worth attention are the fruit's membranes and the dressing.
- Take the pulp out cleanHalve the grapefruit, cut around each segment to free it from the membrane, then lift the segments out whole and let them drain in a sieve for ten minutes. Any pith or membrane left on turns the whole salad bitter, and undrained juice will thin the mayonnaise into soup.
- Saving the shellsScrape the emptied halves clean with a spoon so no bitter white remains, and trim a sliver off the base of each so it sits flat on the lettuce. Chilling the shells while you mix the filling helps them hold their shape.
- Mayonnaise without mustardMustard is usually in mayonnaise for flavour and is generally reckoned to help steady the emulsion alongside the egg yolk, so leaving it out makes the sauce a little less forgiving. Add the oil very slowly at the start and keep everything at room temperature. This is a Pompeian booklet, so olive oil is the intended oil; a mild or light olive oil suits fruit better than a peppery one.
- Raw eggUncooked mayonnaise is served as-is here. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the filled shells refrigerated until they go to the table.
- Hickory nutsHickory nuts were a common gathered nut in 1900s America and are now hard to buy; pecans, their close relation, are the direct substitute. Toast whatever nut you use for six to eight minutes at 350F and cool it before mixing, or it will go soft against the wet fruit.
- The fruit has changedGrapefruit of this period tended to be more acid and less sweet than the red varieties common now. With a sweet modern grapefruit the salad can read as dessert, so a squeeze of lemon in the mayonnaise restores the intended tartness.
- Proportion and yieldAbout a cup of nut pieces to the pulp of two grapefruit, bound with roughly half a cup of mayonnaise, is a workable ratio. Two grapefruit make four filled shells, enough for four as a salad course.
- Assemble lateGrapefruit sheds juice continuously once cut. Combine the pulp, nuts and mayonnaise no more than half an hour before serving, or the filling separates in the shell.
This comes from a promotional recipe booklet issued by the Pompeian olive oil company, one of dozens of branded pamphlets American food firms distributed in the early twentieth century to teach cooks uses for a product they might not otherwise buy — in this case, olive oil as the base of homemade mayonnaise rather than as a medicine or a table condiment. The grapefruit itself was still a relative novelty on northern tables: commercial groves in Florida expanded rapidly in the decades around 1900, with Texas planting following later, and refrigerated rail shipping carried the fruit to city markets far beyond the growing regions. Serving food back in its own hollowed shell was a common feature of the period's salad course, which favoured composed, individually plated dishes on a leaf of lettuce over anything tossed in a bowl. The instruction to leave mustard out of the mayonnaise fits the era's fruit salads, where the dressing was generally kept bland and pale so as not to fight the fruit.<br><br>The stray characters at the end of the text are most likely the remains of printers' ornaments, garbled in scanning.