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Celery Salad
Scrape and wash the tender hearts of crisp celery, cut in oneinch pieces; cut pieces in straws lengthwise; there should be two cups. Add one cup blanched and shredded almonds, mix well and marinate with French Dressing and let stand one hour. Drain and arrange in nests of heart lettuce leaves, sprinkle with the rings of Spanish onion thinly sliced (using the heart rings). Mask with Mayonnaise or with Boiled Salad Dressing.
A plain composed salad that depends entirely on the celery being crisp and the almonds being cut, not chopped. Two components are cross-references to other pages in the book, so decide on your dressings before you start.
- Two dressings, not oneThe celery is first marinated in the book's French dressing (an oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper; see the book's own recipe for proportions) and then masked with mayonnaise or boiled dressing when the salad is assembled. Draining the marinade thoroughly matters; wet celery will slide the mayonnaise off the plate.
- Blanched and shredded almondsBlanching means pouring boiling water over whole raw almonds, standing a minute, and slipping off the skins. Shredded here means cut lengthwise into slivers with a knife while still damp and soft, not the pre-toasted flakes sold today, though slivered almonds are an acceptable substitute.
- Celery heartsThe instruction to scrape is about pulling off fibres with a paring knife, which suggests stringier stalks than a modern bunch usually has. With supermarket celery, use the pale inner ribs and skip the scraping unless the strings are obvious.
- StrawsCut the one-inch lengths lengthwise into thin matchsticks rather than thick batons; "straws" implies a fine cut.
- Spanish onionA large mild onion. Slice the centre of a crosswise cut so you get small complete rings, which is what the recipe means by heart rings; a sweet onion is the nearest thing on a modern shelf. The recipe adds the onion at assembly rather than into the marinade.
- Boiled salad dressingThe book's other option is the older cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar, closer to a warm custard than to mayonnaise. It sets firmer than mayonnaise when chilled and masks the salad more neatly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of celery with a cup of almonds will fill roughly four lettuce nests as a salad course.
Celery was a comparatively expensive winter vegetable in American cities into the early twentieth century, sold upright in tall cut-glass celery vases and served raw as a delicacy in its own right, which is why it turns up as the centrepiece of a salad rather than as a background flavour. The layered construction here marinated filling, lettuce nest, onion rings, a mask of dressing his the standard grammar of the period's salad course, where a salad was expected to be built and dressed to a set pattern rather than tossed.