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Salad Chiffonade
Cook two green peppers in boiling water to which onefourth teaspoon soda has been added, one minute; cool, and shred. Shred one head of romaine, remove pulp from one large grape fruit, and cut three small ripe tomatoes in quarters lengthwise. Arrange in salad dish and serve with French Dressing.
A composed salad from the era when grapefruit was still a fashionable novelty. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are about the blanching soda and the order of assembly.
- Skip the sodaThe quarter-teaspoon of baking soda in the blanching water is there to keep the peppers vividly green — alkaline water protects chlorophyll. It also softens cell walls to mush and strips vitamin C, and a one-minute blanch of pepper needs no help. Blanch in plain salted water, or leave the peppers raw for more snap.
- Shock the peppersThe recipe says only "cool." Cooling quickly in ice water is the usual modern practice and keeps the peppers from going limp and drab; left to cool in air they carry on softening.
- Chiffonade means thread-fineStack the romaine leaves, roll them into a cigar, and cut across at about 1/8 inch. The same for the peppers, cut lengthwise into ribbons. The dish is named for the cut, so a coarse chop changes it into something else.
- "Remove pulp from one grape fruit"This probably means supremes: cut off peel and pith, then cut each segment free of its membranes over a bowl to catch the juice; the recipe says only to remove the pulp, so scooping the flesh from the halves would also answer. Grapefruit of the period tended to be tarter than the sweetest sorts sold now; taste before you dress, and use less vinegar if the fruit is sharp.
- French Dressing in this bookFarmer's French Dressing is a plain oil-and-vinegar mixture with salt and pepper, closer to two parts oil to one part vinegar as printed, whisked or shaken, no mustard and no sugar. Grapefruit juice already brings acid, so a lighter hand than usual is sensible.
- Dress at the tableShredded lettuce collapses within minutes of meeting oil and acid, and quartered tomatoes weep. Arrange everything cold and dry, pass the dressing separately or add it as it goes out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one head of romaine, one grapefruit and three tomatoes should make roughly four salad portions.
Chiffonade is French for something like "made of rags" — the term belongs to the knife rather than the ingredients, and in classical kitchens describes leaves rolled and sliced into fine shreds, usually sorrel or lettuce for soups and garnishes. The Boston Cooking-School book borrows the word for a raw salad, which is characteristic of how American cookery of the period picked up French vocabulary and applied it loosely. The grapefruit offers a rough hint at dating, though one ingredient can hardly settle the question: Florida groves were shipping the fruit north in commercial quantity by the turn of the twentieth century, and it appears repeatedly in salads of this era precisely because it was still slightly exotic and expensive. Combining fruit with lettuce and a vinaigrette is often said to have been a fashion of the 1900s and 1910s.