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French Dressing (Peel oranges and remove pulp)
Peel oranges, and remove pulp separately from each section. Peel bananas, and cut in one-fourth inch slices. Remove skins and seeds from grapes. Break walnut meats in pieces. Mix prepared ingredients and arrange on lettuce leaves. Serve with French Dressing.
A fruit salad from the era when "salad" still meant something dressed and served on lettuce. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- French Dressing in this bookFarmer's French Dressing is not the sweet orange bottled stuff sold under that name today. It is roughly half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper (paprika in some printings) stirred with four tablespoons of oil and two of vinegar until well blended. Lemon juice in place of vinegar suits fruit better.
- Quantities and yieldTwo oranges, two bananas, a cup of grapes and a half cup of walnuts dresses four lettuce cups. Scale from there; the salad does not keep.
- Sectioning the oranges"Remove pulp separately from each section" means supreming: cut away peel and white pith, then free each segment from its membrane with a paring knife. Work over a bowl so the juice is caught rather than lost.
- Seeded grapesThe instruction to remove skins and seeds reflects the seeded, tough-skinned table grapes of the period, such as Malaga or Concord. Modern seedless table grapes need only halving, and the skins are thin enough to leave on.
- Bananas lastSlice the bananas immediately before assembling and toss them in a little of the citrus juice. Cut half an hour ahead they go brown and slack, which is the one thing that spoils this salad's appearance.
- Walnuts"Walnut meats" are shelled walnut kernels. Breaking them by hand rather than chopping keeps the pieces large enough to read as walnut; toasting them briefly is an improvement the original does not ask for.
- ServingDress the fruit lightly and just before it goes to table, or the salt draws juice and the lettuce wilts. Whole small lettuce leaves used as cups hold the fruit better than shredded leaves.
Fruit salads dressed with oil and vinegar rather than sugar and cream were a mark of the fashionable American table around 1900, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a long run of them in its salad chapter. Their appearance owes much to refrigerated rail transport and the Florida and California citrus trade, which by the 1890s put oranges within reach of northern households outside the Christmas season; bananas, shipped in quantity from Central America from the 1880s onward, went from curiosity to commonplace in about a generation. The combination of citrus, banana, grape and nut on a lettuce leaf became a standing formula in American cookbooks for decades, and its later descendants swapped the French dressing for mayonnaise or whipped cream, which is how fruit salad drifted toward the dessert end of the meal.