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Bermuda-Onion and Orange Salad
For the individual salad use one slice of Ber.. muda onion and two of orange. Serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing.
A three-line assembly with no quantities beyond the slice count, so the work is all in the cutting and the dressing.
- Bermuda onionA large, flat, mild sweet onion, white or pale yellow, once shipped in quantity from Bermuda. Any modern sweet onion — Vidalia, Walla Walla, Maui — stands in; a standard yellow storage onion will be too harsh raw.
- Cut thinThe recipe gives no thickness. Thin slices, cut crosswise so they hold their rings, keep the onion from dominating everything else on the plate.
- Taming the onionIf the onion is sharper than expected, soak the slices in ice water for 15 to 20 minutes and pat dry. The recipe does not call for it, and it costs nothing.
- The orangePeel down to the flesh with a knife, removing all white pith, then cut crosswise into rounds. Pith left on turns the salad bitter and the dressing cloudy.
- French dressing, period senseIn a book of this vintage this generally means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together rather than anything creamy, though period versions often add mustard or paprika. Roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar; lemon juice suits the orange better than a sharp cider vinegar.
- Dress at the last momentOrange rounds shed juice as soon as they are salted and cut, which thins the dressing and wilts the lettuce. Assemble on the plate and spoon the dressing over as it goes to table.
- YieldAs written this is one plate. Scale by the head: one onion slice and two orange slices per person, on a leaf or two of a crisp lettuce.
A cookbook of left-overs is an odd home for a salad built from two fresh ingredients. Bermuda onions were a recognisable item in American markets from the late nineteenth century, imported by steamer and prized because they could be eaten raw without punishing the palate ame large mild onion long after the trade itself shifted to Texas and elsewhere. Onion-and-orange combinations of this kind are often traced to Spanish and North African tables, where the same pairing appears with olives and oil, and they reached American cookbooks at a time when the arrival of reliable winter citrus made fruit on the salad plate fashionable rather than eccentric.