Recipe: orange salad

2017-01-13 Delicate, flavourful orange salad is a traditional Sicilian dish that is perfect during the Christmas holidays and during the winter months, when blood oranges (Tarocco type)are available. They are normally seedless and have beautiful red and orange striped flesh.
Excellent as an appetiser adding an original touch of elegance to a meal, orange salad is also a great side dish, as its tart flavour is the ideal accompaniment to particularly fatty dishes.
Originally from China and southeast Asia, the sweet orange (as distinct from the bitter orange) is the fruit of Citrus aurantium, an evergreen that grows to a height of up to twelve metres with elongated fleshy leaves and bright white flowers.
The name “orange” comes from the Persian narang, which in turn is descended from the Sanskrit word nagaranja, meaning “favourite fruit of the elephants”.
The orange came to Europe in the 14th century, imported by Portuguese sailors, though a number of ancient documents already mention it in the first century after Christ, when it was cultivated in Sicily and known as melarancia or orange apple. The orange may have come to the Mediterranean in antiquity and found a favourable climate on the warm Italian island, where, however, it stopped growing for some reason until it was brought back by Portuguese sailors in the Middle Ages. The orange is in fact still called portugal in many Italian regional dialects.
The recipe we are suggesting is quick and easy: it only takes half an hour to prepare.
The ingredients for four people are: two blood oranges; one lemon; one endive; 50 ml extra virgin olive oil; salt and pepper to taste.
To prepare it: Peel the oranges and lemons, removing the bitter pith, and using only the pulp, dividing it into wedges and saving the juice. Whisk the orange and lemon juice with salt, pepper and extra virgin olive oil. Dress the oranges and lemons with this sauce and serve on a bed of washed and dried endive leaves or inside empty orange peels.
The classic Sicilian orange salad recipe uses fennel in place of endive, with the addition of a few tablespoons of pitted black olives. There are also two variants. The first adds a red onion from Tropea, sliced thin and soaked in water for ten minutes to give it a more delicate flavour. In the second variant, a handful of pine nuts and raisins that have been soaked in water for ten minutes to soften them and then squeezed dry are added to the recipe.

Mariagrazia Villa

Recipe: chef Mario Grazia (Academia Barilla)
Source: Academia Barilla (ed.), Cucina Italiana. I grandi classici della nostra tradizione, Edizioni White Star, Novara, 2012.