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Pepper and Grape Fruit Salad
Cut slices from stem ends of six green peppers, and remove seeds. Refill with grape fruit pulp, finely cut celery, and English walnut meats broken in pieces, allowing twice as much grape fruit as celery, and two nut meats to each pepper. Arrange on chicory or lettuce leaves, and serve with Mayonnaise Dressing.
A stuffed-pepper salad from the era when green bell peppers were treated as edible cups. The whole dish depends on getting the grapefruit into clean, dry segments.
- The hinge: dry the grapefruitSection the fruit over a bowl, strip every scrap of membrane and pith, then drain the pulp on paper towels for a few minutes. Wet segments thin the mayonnaise into a pink slick at the bottom of the pepper.
- "Green peppers"Ordinary green bell peppers, chosen small and squat so they sit upright. If the peppers you buy are large, six of them may need more filling than the recipe's proportions suggest; use eight small ones instead.
- Hollowing them outCut the lid off at the stem end, pull the seed core, and trim the pale interior ribs, which are the bitterest part. Trim the base flat if the pepper wobbles.
- English walnut meatsSimply the common walnut, as distinct from the American black walnut. Two halves per pepper is sparse by current taste; toast them briefly and use three or four.
- Grapefruit to celeryTwo parts fruit to one part celery by volume. Cut the celery fine — 1/8-inch dice — so it reads as crunch rather than as string.
- ChicoryIn American books of this period chicory usually means curly endive (frisée), not Belgian endive or the blue-flowered root. Either curly endive or leaf lettuce works as the bed.
- MayonnaiseThe book's own dressing is a raw-yolk mayonnaise. Jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of the reserved grapefruit juice is a reasonable stand-in; if you make it fresh, use pasteurized eggs.
- Yield and timingSix peppers, six servings as a first course or luncheon salad. Fill no more than an hour ahead and chill; longer and the celery softens and the peppers weep.
This is a salad of the grapefruit moment. Florida groves were shipping the fruit north in commercial quantities by the 1890s, and it moved quickly from a curiosity into the fashionable American salad course. Fannie Farmer's salad chapters are full of this pattern — hollowed tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and apples used as containers — a style of composed, individually portioned salad that suited the cooking-school ideal of neat, measurable, plated food and the era's enthusiasm for what were often called "cases" or "cups."