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Fruit Salad
2 oranges 3 bananas pound malaga grapes 4 slices pineapple, cubed 12 walnuts Mix fruit and serve salad dressing on top, or add fruit salad dressing to moisten. Mix with whipped cream or fruit salad dressing, or salad dressing only. May be served in orange cups. cup pineapple cup lemon juice
The text as printed has lost most of its fractions, and the last line appears to be a stray fragment of a dressing recipe. Treat it as a proportion sketch rather than a formula.
- Missing quantities"pound malaga grapes" and "cup pineapple / cup lemon juice" have clearly dropped their fractions in printing. A half-pound of grapes is a plausible guess but only a guess; the dressing fragment cannot be reconstructed honestly, so use a dressing recipe you already trust.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm, seeded white table grape once shipped in cork-packed barrels and standard in winter fruit salads. Any seedless green grape stands in; halve them so they take up dressing.
- Pineapple slicesFour slices, probably canned rings, though fresh sliced pineapple is equally possible from the text alone. If canned, drain them well or the salad weeps; about 1 cup of cubes.
- WalnutsTwelve walnuts is ambiguous: it may mean twelve halves or twelve whole nuts cracked out. Add them at the last moment so they stay crisp against the wet fruit.
- "Salad dressing"In a book of this vintage this usually means a cooked, flour-thickened boiled dressing rather than mayonnaise, and "fruit salad dressing" is that same base lightened with fruit juice and often folded with whipped cream. Either reads as sweet-tart, not savoury.
- Orange cupsHalve oranges, scoop the flesh out with a grapefruit spoon, and trim a sliver from the base so they sit level. The scooped segments can go into the salad.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no yield. Dress it within an hour of serving; lemon juice keeps the cut fruit from browning.
Fruit salad dressed with a boiled or whipped-cream dressing and served in a hollowed orange belonged to a distinctly American idea of the salad course, in which sweetened fruit sat where the greens would have gone. Malaga grapes and canned pineapple are the tell: both were winter luxuries made ordinary by rail and cannery in the decades around 1900, and their appearance in a utility cookbook shows how quickly out-of-season fruit became something a middle-class household could take for granted.