Alabama Salad
Cut the hearts of celery in one-fourth inch pieces, there should be two cups. Add one cup of Alabama pecan nut meats broken in quarters and one cup white cabbage cut in very fine shreds. Moisten with Cream Dressing. Serve on a bed of cress. 3 hard cooked egg yolks. 1 teaspoon salt.
Few grains cayenne. 1 teaspoon mustard.
A crisp winter salad of celery, cabbage and pecans dressed with the book's own boiled cream dressing. The trailing list of egg yolks, salt, cayenne and mustard is not part of the salad proper — it is the beginning of that dressing, printed as a cross-reference.
- The dressing is incomplete as printedThree hard-cooked yolks, salt, cayenne and mustard are the seasoning base of the Cream Dressing; the liquid ingredients that finish it are not given on this page. Rub the cooked yolks smooth with the mustard and cayenne before any liquid goes in, so the dressing stays even. Any thick cooked or boiled dressing will serve if you are not working from the full original.
- Celery heartsCelery of this period was often blanched and tended to be milder than modern Pascal. Use only the pale inner ribs and the leafy tops; two cups cut in quarter-inch pieces is roughly two large hearts. Strip any strings from the outer ribs if you have to use them.
- Pecans"Alabama pecan" is a regional designation, not a distinct variety for cooking purposes — any good pecan half broken in quarters does the job. Toasting them dry for six or seven minutes at 350F is not in the original but sharpens flavour considerably.
- White cabbageA firm green head, not savoy and not red. Shred it as finely as you can manage; the original specifies very fine shreds.
- CressThe book means garden cress or watercress, both common on tables of the period. Watercress is the easier find; mache or young arugula stands in acceptably.
- TimingDress this at the table or within a few minutes of serving. Cabbage and celery both weep salt water quickly and a cooked dressing thins and slides off once they do.
- YieldAbout four cups of dressed salad, enough for six as a side course in the Sunday-dinner sequence this book is built around.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the American menu-book tradition of the early 1900s, in which a full dinner was planned week by week and each course cross-referenced to a base recipe printed elsewhere — which is why the cream dressing here trails off mid-list. Salads named for states and cities were a fashion of the period, and the name usually pointed at one ingredient with a regional reputation rather than any dish cooked in that place; here it is the pecan. Commercial pecan orchards in the Gulf states expanded considerably in the decades around 1900 after grafting made named varieties reliable. The combination of celery, cabbage and a cooked egg-yolk dressing is squarely of its moment: raw green salads with oil-and-vinegar are often said to have struck many American households as slightly foreign, while a thick boiled dressing over crisp cut vegetables was thoroughly respectable Sunday fare.