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Orange-and-Walnut Salad
This is a particularly good salad to serve with game. Select fine oranges, remove the peel and every particle of white skin, and slice very thin lengthwise. Slice English walnuts, blanched or plain. To each pint of orange slices add half a pint (scant) of the sliced nuts; dress with three tablespoonfuls of oil, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt, and, if the oranges are particularly sweet, a tablespoonful of lemon juice. Serve on a bed of watercress or lettuce.
A dressing-section salad that is really a fruit-and-nut plate: three ingredients, one of them optional, and no vinegar at all. The measurements are by volume, which is easy enough to translate.
- The measuresA pint of orange slices is 2 cups, loosely packed — figure four to five medium navel oranges. The "scant" half pint of nuts is a little under 1 cup of walnut pieces, roughly 3 oz.
- Cutting the oranges"Slice very thin lengthwise" means cut the peeled orange from stem end to blossom end rather than across into wheels. Do it over a bowl and add any juice that escapes to the dressing.
- Removing the white skinCut the peel away with a knife rather than peeling by hand, taking off the pith and the outer membrane in one pass; leftover pith turns bitter against the oil.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut (Juglans regia), as distinct from the American black walnut the book's readers also had access to. Any supermarket walnut halves will do; black walnuts are far more assertive and would overwhelm the oranges.
- Blanched or plainBlanching here means loosening the papery brown skin in boiling water and rubbing it off, which takes off some of the tannic bitterness. It is fiddly work for a small return. Toasting the nuts briefly in a moderate oven is a modern alternative, though the recipe does not call for it.
- The oilThree tablespoons of a mild olive oil, or a neutral nut oil. This dressing has no mustard, no egg and no vinegar, so it will not emulsify — pour it over and toss, or whisk it with the lemon juice and use it immediately.
- The lemon juiceModern eating oranges are often very sweet, so you will probably want the tablespoon of lemon juice that the recipe leaves conditional.
- Assembly and yieldDress at the last moment; the oranges weep and the greens collapse within ten minutes. Serves four as a side, six as the small game accompaniment the recipe intends.
Fruit salads served with game belong to a long tradition of setting something sharp and sweet against dark, strong-flavoured meat — the same logic as cranberries with turkey or currant jelly with venison. Orange in particular was a standard partner for wild duck and canvasback in nineteenth-century American cooking, usually as a sauce; presenting it raw, sliced and oiled on watercress is the lighter early-twentieth-century treatment, arriving alongside the vogue for the composed salad course. Janet McKenzie Hill, who compiled this book, edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and the collection reflects that milieu: chafing-dish suppers, sandwiches for the bridge table, and salads meant to look considered on a plate. The absence of vinegar is worth noting — the oranges and the lemon supply all the acid, a habit the period called a "French dressing" only loosely, and one that keeps the oil from fighting the fruit.