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French Fruit Salad
Peel two oranges, and, with scissors, remove the thin skin from each section. Cut three bananas in quarter-inch slices and remove the skins and seeds from a half pound of white grapes. Break in small pieces (but not chop) the meats from a dozen English walnuts. 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 grape fruit pulp for the orange, it may be properly served in the shell of a half grape fruit. For other fruit salads see chapter on Cold Desserts.
A plain fruit salad from the era when "French dressing" still meant oil and vinegar. Two details in the original need translating before you shop.
- French dressingIn 1911 this is a simple vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar or lemon juice, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that took the name in the mid-twentieth century, which would overwhelm the fruit.
- White grapes"White" means green, and the instruction to remove seeds tells you the period grape was a seeded variety such as Malaga. Seedless green grapes make the step unnecessary; halve them lengthwise so they carry dressing. Half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups halved.
- English walnutsThe common walnut, as opposed to the black walnut then widespread in America. A dozen nuts in the shell yields roughly 1/2 cup of meats. The recipe specifies breaking rather than chopping, which keeps the pieces large enough to stay distinct in the salad.
- Removing the section membraneCutting away the thin skin from each orange segment with scissors is fiddly but is the point of the dish. It is quicker to supreme the oranges with a paring knife, cutting between the membranes over a bowl to catch the juice.
- Place on iceMeaning the icebox, not a bowl of ice water. Thirty minutes to an hour in the refrigerator is enough; longer and the bananas go soft and grey.
- Bananas lastSlice them just before mixing, or toss them in a little lemon juice, since cut banana browns within minutes. The original assumes an immediate assembly and a short chill.
- Dress at the tableAdd the dressing only when the salad goes onto the lettuce. Fruit sitting in vinaigrette weeps and the leaves collapse.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; two oranges, three bananas and half a pound of grapes would serve about four as a salad course.
Fruit salads served with a savory oil-and-vinegar dressing on lettuce belong to a specific moment in American dining, when the salad course was expanding beyond greens and refrigerated rail and steamship transport had put oranges, grapefruit and Central American bananas on northern tables through much of the year. Butterick's cook book, published by the pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, treats these fruits as ordinary rather than luxurious, which is itself evidence of how fast the trade had grown. Grapefruit was the newest arrival of the three, promoted in the 1890s and 1900s as a breakfast and salad fruit, and the suggestion to serve the salad in a hollowed half shell or an "orange basket" reflects the period's fondness for edible containers and for a table that looked composed. The book's cross-reference to the chapter on cold desserts is a reminder that the line between salad and sweet was still being negotiated: the same bowl of fruit could go either way depending on whether it met vinaigrette or whipped cream.