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Grapefruit and Grape Salad
2 cups grapefruit sections
½ cup Malaga grapes, peeled
2 tablespoons grape-juice and seeded
2 tablespoons French dressing
Peel fine large grapefruit and separate the sections, removing every particle of the bitter white inner skin. Peel and seed the grapes and mix with the grapefruit. Set aside, covered, on ice until very cold. Pour over them the grape-juice and French dressing.
A plain fruit salad that depends entirely on prep work: the grapefruit must be fully freed of membrane and everything must be genuinely cold before dressing. Two points of translation do the rest.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means a simple vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to emulsify. Two tablespoons for this quantity is a light coating, not a pool.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm, pale green seeded table grape once common in American markets. Any large seeded grape works; if you use modern seedless green grapes, skip the seeding step and note that the skins on those are thin enough that peeling is largely unnecessary.
- Peeling grapesBlanch briefly in boiling water, then into ice water, and the skins slip off. Doing it dry with a knife takes far longer and mangles the fruit.
- Removing every particle of white skinThis is the hinge. Cut the peel and pith away to the flesh, then cut each section free of its membrane with a paring knife rather than pulling sections apart, which leaves bitter pith behind. Work over a bowl so the juice is caught.
- Grape juiceThe bottled unfermented juice of the period was commonly Concord, sweeter and more perfumed than white grape juice. Two tablespoons is a small amount alongside the two of dressing.
- "On ice"An hour in the refrigerator does the job. Dress only at the moment of serving; grapefruit sheds juice as it sits and will thin the dressing.
- YieldAbout two and three-quarter cups dressed, which serves four as a small salad course. The recipe itself specifies no bed of greens.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty in American kitchens when this recipe appeared: commercial groves in Florida only became significant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and for years the fruit appeared mainly halved and sugared at breakfast. Its move onto the salad plate belongs to the same fashion that put fruit, nuts and mayonnaise into the early twentieth-century salad course, when a "salad" in a household manual meant almost anything cold arranged on greens and dressed. The bottled unfermented grape juice called for here also marks the period; the market for it grew steadily through the temperance decades, though it remained a growing specialty product, used as much for flavoring desserts and dressings as for drinking.