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Grape Fruit Salad
For a grape fruit salad, select fresh young lettuce and use only the tender leaves, lay them in the salad bowl and add two grape fruit, cut in thin slices, quartered and free of seeds; around the edge arrange perfect halves of English walnuts, and at the moment of serving pour a French dressing over the whole. Rub a small bowl and a spoon well with a clove of garlic, put into the bowl six tablespoonfuls of olive oil, one teaspoonful of salt and half a teaspoonful of black pepper; rub and mix until the salt is thoroughly dissolved; then add by degrees two teaspoonfuls of vinegar. Stir continually for one minute and pour over the lettuce and fruit.
A cold-weather salad from the years when grapefruit was still a novelty on the Northern table. Nothing here is difficult, but the dressing is far more oil-heavy than a modern palate expects, and the fruit needs more knife work than the text admits.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction to pour the dressing "at the moment of serving" is the hinge. Grapefruit sheds juice steadily once cut, and tender lettuce collapses within minutes of meeting oil and salt. Assemble the bowl, keep it cold, and dress it as it goes to the table.
- The oil-to-vinegar ratioSix tablespoons of oil to two teaspoons of vinegar is roughly nine to one, not the three to one usually given for a vinaigrette today. The grapefruit juice is doing the acid's work. If you segment the fruit and drain it well, expect the dressing to taste flat and increase the vinegar to about two tablespoons.
- Cutting the grapefruit"Cut in thin slices, quartered and free of seeds" leaves the bitter membrane in place. Cut away peel and pith with a knife, then lift out the segments between the membranes. Two grapefruit should make enough for about four as a side salad.
- SeedsMost supermarket grapefruit today are near-seedless varieties, so the deseeding step the original insists on is largely obsolete.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, usually said to be called "English" to distinguish it from the American black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Any shelled walnut half from the supermarket is the right thing. Toasting them briefly at 350F and cooling before use improves them considerably.
- The pepperHalf a teaspoon of black pepper in six tablespoons of oil is aggressive by current standards, and pepper of the period was quite likely bought pre-ground. Start with a quarter teaspoon, freshly ground, and adjust.
- The garlic rubRubbing bowl and spoon with a cut clove is the whole of the garlic in this recipe. It gives a faint perfume rather than a flavour, which is the intention. Do not be tempted to mince the clove in.
Grapefruit reached American tables in quantity only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, once Florida groves and refrigerated rail cars made it something other than a curiosity, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treat it as a smart, slightly modish ingredient. That newness shows here: the fruit is paired with walnuts and a garlic-scented French dressing rather than sugared. The salad course itself was a fashionable import in these years, borrowed from French service and given a prominent chapter in many American household books of the period, with "French dressing" meaning nothing more elaborate than oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten by hand. The trick of rubbing the bowl with garlic instead of adding it outright suited a period taste that wanted the suggestion of garlic without any of its plainness.