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Fruit-and-Nut Salad, No. 2
Skin and seed half a pound of white grapes; blanch and slice half a pound of English walnuts or almonds. Toss with four tablespoonfuls of oil, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt and two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice. Serve in nests of lettuce. Garnish the nests with maraschino cherries.
A four-ingredient salad that lives or dies on preparation: the grapes must be genuinely peeled and seeded, and the nuts blanched, or the dish is just fruit in oil.
- White grapes"White" means green table grapes. A half pound is roughly 1 1/2 cups. Seedless varieties make the seeding step moot, but the skinning still matters -- slip the skins by covering the grapes with boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then pinching. Halve them lengthwise if they are large.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut of the supermarket, as distinct from the American black walnut, which is far more assertive and would bully this salad. Half a pound is about 2 cups of halves.
- Blanching the nutsFor almonds, 60 seconds in boiling water loosens the brown skins so they rub off. Walnut halves cannot really be skinned; blanching them briefly takes the edge of bitterness off the pellicle. Dry them thoroughly before slicing or the dressing will not cling.
- The dressing is deliberately sharpThe dressing is sharp -- Four tablespoons oil to two of lemon juice is a 2:1 ratio, noticeably more acidic than the 3:1 of a conventional modern vinaigrette. With sweet grapes and maraschino cherries it reads as balanced, but taste before you commit and hold back some lemon if your grapes are not very sweet.
- Which oilThe recipe specifies only 'oil', which in this period ordinarily meant a bland salad oil; a neutral oil such as sunflower, or a very mild olive oil, suits it best. A robust extra-virgin will fight the fruit.
- Maraschino cherriesThe original article was marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, though imitations made from dyed sweet cherries in flavoured syrup were already common in America by the early twentieth century. Today's supermarket version is the imitation; cocktail cherries of the Luxardo type are closer to the original.
- TimingDress at the last moment. Skinned grapes weep and blanched nuts soften; a salad assembled an hour ahead turns watery in the lettuce cups.
- YieldFour generous or six modest servings. Use whole cupped leaves from butter or iceberg lettuce for the "nests" -- the loose leaves of a modern salad mix will not hold their shape.
This comes from the era when the salad course was moving out of the vegetable garden and into the fruit bowl. American cookery writers of the 1900s and 1910s treated fruit-and-nut combinations as a light, faintly luxurious course for luncheons and ladies' club suppers, exactly the same social occasions that gave the chafing dish its vogue. The specification of "English walnuts" is a period marker: American cooks had to distinguish the imported Persian walnut from the native black walnut of their own woodlots. So is the lettuce nest, a plating convention so standard in this period that recipes simply say "in nests" and assume the reader can build one.