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Grape Fruit and Celery Salad
Cut medium-sized grape fruits in fourths lengthwise. Remove the pulp, and add to it an equal quantity of finely cut celery. Refill sections with mixture, mask with Mayonnaise Dressing, and garnish with celery tips or curled celery and canned pimentoes cut in strips.
A simple assembly salad from the era when grapefruit was still a novelty on the American table. The only real work is getting the pulp out cleanly and keeping the shells intact enough to serve in.
- "Grape fruit"Two words in the original, one word now. Grapefruit of the period was generally thicker-pithed and more bitter than modern Ruby Red or Star Ruby, and often seedier, though seedless Marsh types were already being grown. A white grapefruit such as Marsh probably gets closer to the intended flavour than a sweet pink one.
- Sectioning the shellsCut lengthwise into quarters, then run a grapefruit spoon or a small serrated knife between membrane and rind to free the pulp in segments. Pull away every scrap of white pith and membrane from the flesh; left in, it turns the dressing bitter.
- Drain the pulpGrapefruit sheds a lot of juice once cut. Let the segments sit in a sieve for ten minutes before mixing or the mayonnaise will thin and slide off. Drain the shells upside down too.
- "An equal quantity of celery"The original does not say whether by volume or by weight; volume is the likelier reading. One medium grapefruit yields roughly a cup of pulp, so about a cup of celery cut in small dice -- the outer ribs give better crunch, the inner ones less string.
- "Mask"Period usage for coating the surface completely, not a spoonful on top. A stiff homemade mayonnaise holds its shape; commercial mayonnaise thinned with a spoon of cream spreads more evenly if you prefer.
- Canned pimentoesStill sold in small jars, and jarred roasted red pepper cut in narrow strips does the same job. Blot them dry before laying them on, or they bleed pink into the white dressing.
- Curled celeryAn old garnish: split short lengths of celery lengthwise several times at one end, leaving the base intact, then drop into ice water for half an hour until the strips curl back.
- YieldOne grapefruit makes four servings, so two fruits serve eight as a first course or salad alongside a cold luncheon dish. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep cold.
Grapefruit reached American markets in commercial quantity only in the 1880s, largely from Florida groves, and for a generation it was treated as a luxury, served in halves at breakfast or, as here, pressed into service in the elaborate salad course that Fannie Farmer's generation is often said to have loved. The pairing with celery is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American salad-making, which prized crispness and a bland foil for heavy mayonnaise; celery was sold in tall glass celery vases at good tables. Serving food back in its own shell was one hostess strategy of the period, cheap in cost and generous in effect, and the pimento strips supply the dash of colour that Farmer's contemporaries are generally said to have considered the finishing mark of a well-dressed plate.