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Oyster and Grape Fruit Salad
Parboil one and one-half pints oysters, drain, cool, and remove tough muscles. Cut three grape fruits in halves crosswise, remove pulp, and drain. Mix oysters with pulp, and season with six tablespoons tomato catsup, four tablespoons grape fruit juice, one tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce, eight drops Tabasco sauce, and one-half teaspoon salt. Refill grape fruit skins with mixture, and garnish with curled celery.
Chicken Salad I Cut cold boiled fowl or remnants of roast chicken in onehalf inch cubes, and marinate with French Dressing, Add an equal quantity of celery, washed, scraped, cut in small pieces, chilled in cold or ice-water, drained, and dried in a towel. Just before serving moisten with Cream, Oil, or Mayonnaise Dressing. Mound on a salad dish, and garnish with yolks of "hard-boiled" eggs forced through a potato ricer, capers, and celery tips.
Two entries have run together in the typesetting here: the oyster and grapefruit salad ends at "garnish with curled celery," and Chicken Salad I is a separate recipe that follows it in the book. Notes below cover both.
- Parboil means barelyOysters need only a minute or two in their own liquor or simmering salted water, lifted out the moment the edges ruffle and the bodies firm. Anything longer and they shrink and turn rubbery, which is fatal in a cold salad where there is no sauce to hide behind.
- Quantity of oystersA pint and a half of shucked oysters is about 3 cups, roughly 36 small ones or 24 larger. Buy them shucked in liquor from the fish counter and drain the liquor into the pot for parboiling.
- The tough muscleThat is the adductor, the pale firm nub where the oyster gripped its shell. It stays chewy however briefly it is cooked; pinch it off with your fingers after draining.
- Emptying the grapefruitCut across the equator, run a curved grapefruit knife around the inside wall, then free each segment from its membrane. Work over a bowl so the juice is caught for the dressing, and trim a sliver from each base so the shells sit level.
- Catsup of the periodTomato catsup of this era was generally thinner, more vinegary and less sweet than the modern bottled kind. Six tablespoons of today's ketchup will read as noticeably sugary, so taste before adding it all and lean harder on the grapefruit juice and Tabasco.
- Yield and servingThree grapefruits give six filled halves, enough for six as a first course. Fill and chill no more than an hour ahead; the fruit acid may firm the oysters further as they stand.
- Curled celeryCut celery into short lengths, slit each end lengthwise several times, and leave in ice water until the fringes spring outward. Twenty minutes is usually enough.
- Chicken Salad I"Cold boiled fowl" means a stewing hen simmered until tender; a poached or roasted chicken does the same work. The bird is dressed twice, first marinated in French Dressing, then moistened with mayonnaise or cream dressing just before serving so the celery stays crisp.
This belongs to the American grapefruit moment. Florida groves were shipping the fruit north in commercial quantities by the 1890s, and it moved quickly from novelty to fashionable first course, served in halves at breakfast and hollowed out as a salad shell at dinner. The dressing here — catsup, Worcestershire, Tabasco, citrus juice, salt — is the standard oyster cocktail sauce of the period, and the dish is essentially an oyster cocktail served in fruit rather than a stemmed glass, a combination the era liked for its contrast of cold brine and sharp sweetness. Fannie Farmer's book ran through many enlarged editions after 1896, and salads of this kind, built for looks as much as for eating and garnished with celery curls and riced egg yolk, reflect the school's emphasis on the presented plate as evidence of a cook's training.