Malaga Salad
Remove skins and seeds from white grapes; add an equal quantity of English walnut meats, blanched and broken in pieces. Marinate with French Dressing. Serve on lettuce leaves and garnish with Maraschino cherries.
A two-ingredient salad that depends entirely on the quality of the grapes and the freshness of the nuts. The original assumes you know what "French Dressing" meant in this book and that you are willing to peel grapes.
- Malaga grapesMalagas were large, thick-skinned, seeded white grapes shipped from Spain in cork-packed barrels — the standard winter dessert grape in American markets. Modern seedless green grapes are a reasonable stand-in, and skip the seeding step entirely.
- Skinning the grapesWith thick-skinned grapes the skins slip off after a brief dip in boiling water and a plunge into cold. With thin-skinned supermarket grapes the peeling is fussy and largely pointless; halving them is closer to the intended texture.
- Blanching walnuts"Blanched" here means covered with boiling water for a few minutes so the bitter brown skin can be rubbed off. Modern walnuts are usually eaten skin and all, but blanching genuinely removes tannic bitterness and is worth doing if the nuts are not fresh.
- French DressingIn this book that is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, not a creamy bottled dressing. Period proportions run somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar. Use a mild oil; a strong olive oil overwhelms the grapes.
- How long to marinateFifteen to twenty minutes chilled is enough. Longer and the acid draws water out of the grapes and the dressing goes thin and watery on the plate.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given. About two cups of grapes and two cups of walnut meats dressed with a third of a cup of dressing serves six as a salad course.
- Maraschino cherriesThe garnish originally meant real cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, closer to a cocktail cherry than the bright red confection sold today. A good brandied or luxardo-style cherry is far nearer the original intent.
Fruit-and-nut salads bound with dressing and served on a lettuce leaf became fashionable in America in the 1890s, around the same period as the Waldorf, helped along by an expanding winter fruit trade. Malaga grapes, named for the Andalusian port they shipped from, were among the few fresh fruits reliably available in a northern city in January. The combination of grape, walnut and oil dressing is long established in the Mediterranean, but its presentation here — chilled, garnished, on a bed of lettuce — belongs squarely to the American ladies' luncheon of the period, where such salads were expected to look composed.