Home › Salads and Salad Dressing › Cucumber and Grape Fruit Salad
Cucumber and Grape Fruit Salad
Prepare the grape fruit as for the preceding recipe, add an equal quantity of sliced cucumbers, marinate with French dressing, and serve in the shells which remain after removing the pulp from the halves of the fruit. Cut the edge of the shell in large notches, placing a raspberry in each depression. This makes an unusually attractive dish.
A cold composed salad that depends entirely on presentation and on the fruit being properly sectioned. The preceding recipe it refers to means halving the grapefruit, cutting out the pulp free of membrane, and keeping the shells intact.
- Sectioning the grapefruitCut each fruit in half crosswise, run a knife around the inside of the peel and between the membrane walls, then lift out the segments whole. Every scrap of white pith and membrane should come away; it is bitter and spoils the dressing.
- French dressing, 1911 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means oil and vinegar at roughly three to one, with salt, pepper and often a little paprika, beaten or shaken to an emulsion just before use.
- The cucumbersCucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned and seedier than the varieties sold now. Peel, seed if the core is watery, slice thin, and salt for fifteen minutes then drain and pat dry, or the salad waters down the dressing in the shell.
- Marinating timeThe recipe gives none. Twenty to thirty minutes, chilled, is probably enough; left dressed much longer the grapefruit softens and the cucumber goes limp.
- Making the shells standShave a thin slice from the base of each half so it sits level. Notch the rim with kitchen shears or a small knife in bold scallops rather than fine points, which tear.
- RaspberriesPurely decorative, and they will bleed into the dressing if crushed. Set them in the notches at the last moment; out of season, use a small strawberry cut to sit flat or omit them.
- YieldOne grapefruit gives two servings. The "equal quantity" is not defined; read as volume of prepared pulp, roughly half to a whole medium cucumber per fruit will answer.
- ServingServe cold, on a folded napkin or a bed of cress to keep the shells from sliding, as a first course or an accompaniment to cold poultry.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty on American tables when the Butterick Publishing Company issued this book in 1911. Commercial groves in Florida had by then begun to make the fruit more widely available, and it carried an air of the fashionable breakfast and the smart luncheon rather than the everyday. That newness may explain the elaborate treatment here: the fruit is not merely eaten but hollowed, notched and used as its own dish, in the manner of the period's taste for salads served in cases, cups and shells. Butterick, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at the aspiring middle-class housekeeper, and recipes of this kind offered a way to produce something visibly stylish without expense or a trained cook. The phrase "an unusually attractive dish" is the whole point of the recipe.