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Fruit Salad (Winter Peel two oranges)
(Winter.) Peel two oranges; with a sharp knife cut between the pulp and the skin and remove the section entire. Slice the meats of one-fourth a pound of English walnuts. Of one-fourth a pound of figs select a few for a garnish and cut the rest in thin slices. Slice three bananas. Toss half the ingredients with two or three tablespoonfuls of oil, and, if the oranges are sweet, toss again with one tablespoonful of lemon juice. Arrange in a mound on a salad-dish. Put the rest of the fruit, each kind separately, on the mound in sections; garnish the edge and top with heart leaves of lettuce, and add stars of mayonnaise and candied cherries here and there.
A composed winter fruit salad from the era when a salad was expected to be built and garnished rather than tossed and served. The construction is the point: half the fruit dressed and mounded, the rest laid over it in wedges of a single kind each.
- Cutting the orangesWhat the recipe describes is supreming — cutting between membrane and flesh to free each segment whole. Slice off top and bottom first so the fruit sits flat, pare away peel and white pith down to the flesh, then cut. Work over a bowl and the juice is caught.
- Weights in cupsA quarter pound of shelled walnut halves is roughly one cup, though the recipe's phrasing — 'the meats of one-fourth a pound' — may mean a quarter pound of nuts in the shell, which would give about half as much meat. A quarter pound of dried figs is about five or six figs. "English walnuts" simply means the common walnut, as distinct from the American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm this.
- The figsDried figs are meant, not fresh — this is a winter salad. Stem them and slice thin; if they are leathery, a brief soak in warm water or orange juice makes them sliceable. Choose the plumpest few for the garnish before cutting the rest.
- The oil"Oil" in a salad book of this kind means olive oil, and the olive oil generally sold in this period was milder than a sharp modern extra-virgin, which will fight the fruit; use a light olive oil or a neutral oil if you want the fruit forward.
- Bananas lastSlice the bananas at the moment of assembly. Fifteen minutes ahead and they will grey at the edges; the lemon juice in the dressing helps only what it actually touches.
- The mayonnaiseStars of mayonnaise piped onto fruit reads oddly now, and modern jarred mayonnaise tends to be more vinegar-forward than a freshly made one. A thick homemade mayonnaise made with lemon rather than vinegar, or a spoonful folded into whipped cream, sits better with oranges and figs.
- YieldNo serving count is given. As written this makes a mound for four to six as a side salad, or a light dessert course for four.
History: Fruit salads dressed with oil and finished with mayonnaise belong to a particular American moment: the turn of the twentieth century, when the salad course was expanding well beyond greens. The seasonal label — Winter — is doing real work here, since the ingredients are precisely what a northern kitchen could get in January: shipped citrus and bananas, dried figs, stored nuts, hothouse lettuce hearts. Candied cherries appear frequently in cookbooks of this period as a garnish, valued less for flavour than for the spot of red they put on a pale dish. The insistence on arranging each fruit in its own section rather than mixing everything reflects the standard for company food, where a salad was judged first on how it looked when it reached the table.