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White Grape Salad
Peel one pound of white grapes, remove the seeds by cutting the grapes almost in two, with a thin sharp knife. Arrange on lettuce leaves, and serve with French dressing or mayonnaise.
F
A three-line fruit salad that depends entirely on the quality of the grapes and the restraint of the dressing. The trailing "F" in the text is a printer's mark, not an ingredient.
- "White grapes"Period usage for what we call green grapes, typically the large thick-skinned Malaga or Almeria types sold loose in autumn. Any firm green table grape works; the fat ones hold up better against a sharp dressing than small thin-skinned varieties.
- Seeds and peelingSeedless grapes did not dominate the market in 1911, hence the instruction to halve and pick out the pips. With modern seedless fruit that step disappears, but the peeling is what makes the dish, since the skins are the bitter, chewy part. Cover the grapes with boiling water for about ten seconds and the skins slip off.
- French dressing, 1911 senseOil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion, not the sweet orange bottled kind that later took the name. Roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar; lemon juice suits grapes better than a harsh cider vinegar.
- Mayonnaise optionPeriod mayonnaise is typically thick and egg-yolk heavy. Thin it with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice before it meets the fruit, or it sits on the grapes in a lump.
- Dress at the last momentPeeled grapes weep. Keep them chilled and add the dressing as the plates go out, or the lettuce collapses into a pool of juice.
- LettuceWhole cups of a crisp head lettuce work well as edible bowls, though the recipe specifies only leaves. Torn leaves look untidy under loose fruit.
- YieldA pound of grapes, peeled, makes four small first-course salads or two generous ones.
Peeled-grape salads belong to the brief era when fruit at the table was a mark of luxury and labour was cheap, both features of the household the Butterick Cook Book (1911) addressed. Butterick was a pattern company, and its cookbook sat alongside its dressmaking and homemaking publications as guidance for women running a house with limited help but real aspirations. Salads of this kind arrived in American cookery in the late nineteenth century as a light course between roast and dessert, an idea generally traced to French service, and they leaned on imported grapes shipped in cork-packed barrels from Spain, which is why the large white Malaga grape turns up so often in books of the period. The tedium of peeling was the point: a dish whose only real ingredient is fruit signals that someone had the time to sit and do it.