Home › Dainty Dishes › Fruit Salad (As a fruit salad the pumelo)
Fruit Salad (As a fruit salad the pumelo)
As a fruit salad the "pumelo" (grape fruit) is unsurpassed; its pure acid, even more appreciated when united with French dressing or mayonnaise. All skin is removed from the pulp, the quarters cut in medium pieces, the dressing poured over it just previous to serving.
A two-line recipe that depends entirely on knife work: everything here rests on getting the fruit out of its membrane cleanly. The rest is timing.
- "Pumelo" means grapefruit hereThe book uses pumelo and grape fruit interchangeably. Today pomelo (Citrus maxima) is a distinct, larger, milder fruit with a thick pith; buy grapefruit, not pomelo, for this.
- "All skin is removed from the pulp"This is the hinge. Cut off the peel and white pith, then cut each segment free of its membrane over a bowl, so only the naked flesh goes into the salad. Membrane left on turns leathery in the mouth and carries most of the bitterness.
- "Quarters" and "medium pieces"The original probably means the natural segments, cut down into smaller pieces. Grapefruit segments are large enough that whole ones eat awkwardly with a fork.
- Dressing at the last momentFollow this literally. Citrus juice thins mayonnaise and weeps within minutes, so dress in the serving dish just before it goes to the table.
- Which dressingFrench dressing of the period was oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, in proportions that varied from about two to one upward depending on the cookbook; some printed versions also add mustard or paprika. If you use mayonnaise, thin it with a spoonful of the collected grapefruit juice or it will sit in clots on the wet fruit.
- The fruit has changedGrapefruit of this period was probably more sour and more bitter than modern varieties such as Ruby Red and Star Ruby, which were bred later. The "pure acid" the writer prizes is likely muted now, so a pinch of salt in the dressing may do more for the flavor than sugar.
- ServingNo yield is given; two medium grapefruit, segmented, would make roughly four small salad servings. The recipe says nothing about presentation beyond dressing the fruit just before it goes to the table.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty when this book appeared. It had been grown in the West Indies since the eighteenth century and reached Florida groves in the nineteenth, but it entered American dining rooms as a fashionable breakfast and first-course fruit only in the closing decades of the century. The name confusion in the entry is genuine and was widespread: the older English words for the citrus family's giant, pomelo or shaddock, were applied loosely to the smaller, sharper fruit, and "grape fruit" — often printed as two words, as here — only settled into standard use later. The usual explanation of the name, that the fruit hangs in grape-like clusters, is traditional rather than documented.