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French Fruit Salad
I orange
1 dozen English walnuts
I banana
Lettuce
½ pound Malaga grapes
French dressing
Peel the oranges and cut away the sections from the membrane by placing a knife parallel with the membrane and slicing down. If the fruit is allowed to stand in cold water after peeling, the bitter white membrane will come off easily.
Peel the bananas and cut in quarter-inch slices. Remove the skins and seeds from the grapes. Break in small pieces, but do not chop, the walnut-meats. Mix these ingredients thoroughly and place on ice. When ready to serve, place on lettuce leaves and serve with French dressing. This salad is pretty served in an orange basket, or, by substituting the grapefruit pulp for the orange, it may be properly served in the shell of a half grapefruit.
A plain fruit vinaigrette salad of the sort that filled the "Salads" chapter of every early twentieth-century household book. Almost nothing needs changing except the grapes and the dressing.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn 1900 "French dressing" was oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken; period ratios ran from about two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today, which would swamp the fruit.
- Quantities are inconsistentThe ingredient list says one orange, the method says "peel the oranges." Two oranges balance the half pound of grapes and the single banana better. The recipe itself gives no yield.
- Malaga grapesLarge, pale green, thick-skinned and seeded — hence the instruction to skin and seed them. Ordinary seedless green or red grapes need neither step; halve them instead. Red Globe is the closest common stand-in if you want the original texture.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, distinguished in period American books from the native black walnut, which is far stronger and would dominate the fruit. A dozen whole nuts in the shell yields roughly two-thirds of a cup of shelled halves.
- Supreming the orangeThe described cut — knife parallel to the membrane, slicing down — is what is now called supreming. Cut the peel and white pith away first, then work over a bowl so the juice is caught rather than lost.
- Keep the banana from browningThe recipe slices banana well ahead of service. Toss the slices in the reserved orange juice; otherwise add them at the last moment, after the salad comes out of the refrigerator.
- "Place on ice"An icebox instruction. Thirty minutes to an hour in the refrigerator is enough — longer and the fruit weeps and the walnuts soften.
- Dress at the tableVinaigrette on cut fruit draws out liquid quickly. Spoon it over only as the plates go out, and choose lettuce with some body, such as Bibb or the heart of a romaine, so the leaves do not collapse.
Fruit salads dressed with oil and vinegar rather than mayonnaise or boiled dressing were a mark of the "French" style in American cookbooks around 1900, when the salad course was still a fairly new fixture on middle-class tables and the vegetable-versus-fruit question was unsettled. The Malaga grape named here arrived in quantity from Spain in the late nineteenth century and was a winter luxury, shipped packed in cork dust and sold well past the domestic grape season, which is part of why a recipe like this could be offered as an elegant addition to a cold-weather menu. The serving suggestions are equally of their period: the hollowed orange basket and the grapefruit shell belong to a moment when household publishers were teaching a broad readership presentation as much as cookery, and grapefruit itself was still novel enough in many American households to be worth showing off in its own skin.