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Monte Carlo Salad
Remove pulp from four large grape fruits, and drain. Add an equal quantity of finely cut celery, and apple cut in small pieces. Moisten with Mayonnaise, pile on a shallow salad dish, arrange around a border of lettuce leaves, and mask with Mayonnaise. Outline, using green Mayonnaise, four oblongs to represent playing cards, and denote spots on cards by canned pimentoes or truffles; pimentoes cut in shapes of hearts and diamonds, truffles cut in shapes of spades and clubs. Garnish with cold cooked carrot and turnip, shaped with a small round cutter to suggest gold and silver coin.
A composed salad from the era when a salad was expected to look like something. The eating part is simple; the decoration is the work.
- Drain, then drain againGrapefruit is the hinge here. Segment it, strip every bit of membrane, and let the sections sit in a sieve for at least 20 minutes, pressing lightly. Wet pulp will thin the mayonnaise into a puddle within minutes of assembly.
- QuantitiesFour large grapefruit give roughly 3 to 4 cups of drained pulp. The wording is ambiguous: 'an equal quantity' may mean an equal quantity of celery, with the apple added on top, or celery and apple together. Either reading makes a large platter for a first course.
- AppleCut it last and toss it in a little grapefruit juice or lemon juice; the original assumes you are working quickly, and browned apple ruins the pale ground the decoration sits on.
- "Mask"To mask is to coat the assembled mound smoothly with mayonnaise so no filling shows, giving a flat white surface to draw on. Use a mayonnaise stiff enough to hold a line — thin it with nothing.
- Green mayonnaiseGreen mayonnaise of this period is ordinary mayonnaise tinted with the pressed juice or fine puree of green herbs and leaves such as spinach, parsley or watercress. A piping bag with a fine plain tip is far easier than a period pastry tube.
- TrufflesCanned truffle was more readily stocked in a well-supplied kitchen then than it is affordable now. Black olive, cut with a small aspic cutter or a sharp knife, gives the same silhouette for the spades and clubs at a fraction of the cost.
- CoinsCook the carrot and turnip until just tender, chill, then slice about 1/8 inch thick and stamp with a round cutter. Slicing before cooking makes the disks too soft to handle cleanly.
- Raw eggThe mayonnaise is uncooked and the salad is served cold. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, make it with pasteurized eggs or use a commercial mayonnaise as the base for the tinting.
The name points at the casino at Monte Carlo, and the whole conceit — the mounds of salad and silver coin scattered around them — is a gambling table rendered in vegetables. Salads like this belong to the high period of the American "fancy" salad, roughly 1890 to 1920, when mayonnaise-masked constructions were built to be looked at before anyone touched them. Grapefruit itself was still faintly exotic in kitchens of the day: commercial Florida groves were expanding rapidly through the 1890s, and the fruit turns up in Farmer's book as a breakfast novelty and a salad ingredient rather than an everyday staple. The recipe also shows how much decorative labor a household with a cook could absorb; nothing here is difficult, but the aspic cutters, the pastry tube of green mayonnaise and the tin of truffles all assume a kitchen with time to spare.