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Grapefruit Salad
Cut the chilled fruit in halves, crosswise, and take out the pulp with a spoon; dress with French dressing. The juice of the grapefruit may be used in the place of other acid, and mayonnaise in the place of French dressing. Serve on lettuce leaves, or return to the skin from which the pulp was removed. The edge of the grapefruit cup may be cut in vandykes, or otherwise ornamented.
A minimal recipe that assumes a cook already knows how to build a French dressing and section a grapefruit. Most of the work is in the fruit itself.
- Take out the membrane, not just the pulpThe hinge of the dish: lift the segments free of the bitter white partitions and the pith, working the spoon or a small knife along each wall. Pulp scooped out wholesale carries membrane with it and the salad turns bitter under any dressing.
- French dressing, 1900 styleFrench dressing, in the sense used here -- oil, vinegar or citrus juice, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one acid, and often little else. It is meant to be sharp and thin, not emulsified into a bottled thickness.
- Using the grapefruit juice as the acidGrapefruit juice is markedly less acidic than vinegar or lemon, so a dressing built on it alone tastes flat. Cut it back to about two parts oil to one juice and add salt more generously than you would with vinegar.
- Grapefruit have changedThe seedy, sharply sour white varieties common in this period have largely given way to sweeter pink and red cultivars such as Ruby Red. If yours is very sweet, a squeeze of lemon in the dressing restores the contrast the recipe assumes.
- VandykesA zigzag border cut into the rim of the emptied half-shell, the name traced to the deeply pointed lace collars (and beards) of Van Dyck's portraits. Cut it with a small paring knife before you refill the shell, or the fruit gets in the way.
- Chilling and timingCut and dress close to serving. Grapefruit sheds juice quickly once broken up, and a salad dressed early sits in a thin pool that dilutes the oil.
- Mayonnaise versionIf you use mayonnaise rather than French dressing, drain the segments well first or it will slacken and separate on the plate. A spoonful thinned with a little of the reserved juice sits better on the fruit.
- YieldHalf a grapefruit per person as a first course or salad course; two grapefruit fill four shells if you are serving the fruit back in its skin.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty on the American table when this book appeared: commercially significant Florida groves are generally traced to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and for a good while the fruit was treated as a curiosity or an invalid's dish before it settled into its place at breakfast. Its arrival in the salad chapter reflects the period's enthusiasm for fruit salads dressed with oil and acid, a fashion that filled American cookbooks and hotel menus around 1900. The instruction to serve the fruit back in its own scalloped shell belongs to the same moment, when a salad course was expected to look composed and the vandyked rim was standard decorative vocabulary, applied equally to grapefruit cups, orange baskets and tomato shells.