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Fruit-and-Nut Salad
Peel neatly three oranges and slice them lengthwise; also cut three bananas in thin slices. Skin and seed half a pound of white grapes, and blanch and slice the meats of one-fourth a pound of English walnuts. Serve very cold on lettuce leaves, dressed with four tablespoonfuls of oil, two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice - less, if the oranges are sour - and half a teaspoonful of salt.
A plain 2:1 oil-and-lemon dressing on cut fruit, from the era when "salad" still meant something served on a leaf of lettuce. Almost nothing needs converting; what needs attention is timing and the choice of oil.
- Assemble at the last minuteThe bananas are the hinge. Sliced banana browns within ten or fifteen minutes and turns soft in acid, so cut it last and dress immediately before serving. Oranges and grapes can be prepared hours ahead and chilled.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, distinguished in period books from the American black walnut, which is stronger and more bitter. Note that "the meats of one-fourth a pound" may mean a quarter pound weighed in the shell, which would yield roughly half a cup of meats; a quarter pound of shelled halves is about 1 cup.
- Blanching the nutsPour boiling water over the shelled meats, let them stand a minute or two, then rub off the papery skin. This removes the tannic bitterness and leaves the nuts pale, which is the point in a white-and-orange salad. Modern cooks often toast instead, but that gives a different, darker flavour.
- White grapesThese would generally have been seeded green grapes, and this recipe, like others of its type, calls for skinning them. Half a pound of seedless grapes, halved, does the same work in a fraction of the time; skin them only if you want the original's soft texture.
- Slicing oranges lengthwisePeel down to the flesh, removing all white pith, then cut through the fruit from stem to blossom end, so the segments are cut lengthwise rather than in the familiar pinwheel cross-section. Supremed segments are the modern equivalent and shed less juice.
- The oilSalad oil of the period meant a mild olive or cottonseed oil. Use a gentle olive oil or a neutral one; a peppery modern extra-virgin will fight the fruit.
- Adjust the acidThe instruction to use less lemon with sour oranges is worth taking seriously. Taste the oranges first, and remember the dressing is only 4 tablespoons oil to 2 lemon juice, which is sharper than a standard vinaigrette.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly six as a salad course, or four as a light lunch salad. Whole crisp lettuce leaves suit the dish better than shredded greens.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the turn-of-the-century American vogue for the salad course, when fresh fruit shipped by rail and in refrigerated cars was making oranges, bananas and hothouse grapes more reliably available to northern households outside summer. Fruit salads dressed with oil and lemon rather than mayonnaise or boiled dressing were considered the lighter option. The care given to skinning and seeding the grapes and blanching the nuts reflects a period concern with neatness in cold dishes: the components uniform, and eaten without further work at the table. Bananas were the most recent arrival of the three fruits, having become widely available in American kitchens only in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.