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Chiffonade Salad
Cut the hearts of celery in one-inch pieces, cut pieces in straws to fill one cup. Remove the pulp from grape fruit, leaving each half-section in its original shape. There should be one cup. Peel and chill four medium-sized tomatoes (Southern or hot-house at this season), cut in slices. Cut the bleached leaves of Chicory in pieces for serving, arrange in nests on serving dish, and arrange other ingredients in separate mounds in the nests. Marinate with French Dressing, and garnish each with chopped parsley, green and red sweet peppers cut in thread-like strips, and sprays of pepper-grass or parsley. Pass Mayonnaise Dressing.
A composed winter salad built on contrast of textures rather than a tossed bowl. Nearly everything here still exists, though two of the greens go by other names now.
- ChicoryPeriod American usage was inconsistent, applying the name both to witloof (what a supermarket now sells as Belgian endive) and to curly endive; the recipe's "bleached leaves" points to a blanched heart of one or the other. Curly endive (frisée) works if you use only the blanched heart; the dark outer leaves are too coarse and bitter to form the "nests".
- Pepper-grassA name used for Lepidium cresses, most often garden cress, Lepidium sativum. Watercress or the fine cress sold in punnets is the closest substitute; mâche will do for looks but not for the peppery bite.
- Grapefruit sections"Remove the pulp… leaving each half-section in its original shape" means supreming: cut away peel and pith, then free each segment from its membrane with a knife. Do it over a bowl and keep the juice for the dressing. One cup takes roughly one large grapefruit.
- The tomatoesThe parenthesis is the point of the whole dish — at the season indicated, tomatoes meant Southern shipments or glasshouse fruit at a serious price. Modern hothouse tomatoes are reliably available and reliably bland; chill them as directed, and salt the slices lightly a few minutes before serving.
- French DressingAt this period that means a plain vinaigrette — oil with vinegar or lemon juice, salt and pepper, in the region of three or four parts oil to one of acid, whisked or shaken at the last moment. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Marinate brieflyDress the mounds no more than a few minutes before serving. Celery straws go limp and grapefruit weeps once acid and salt have been sitting on them, and the whole appeal of a composed salad is that the piles stay distinct.
- Passing the mayonnaiseThe vinaigrette is on the salad; the mayonnaise goes round separately in a boat so each diner adds their own. If you make it by hand, note it is uncooked egg yolk — use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone vulnerable, or buy a good commercial mayonnaise.
- YieldFour tomatoes and a cup each of celery and grapefruit make four generous salad plates, which suits the Sunday dinner menus this book is organised around.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the wave of American menu books published around 1913 that planned a household's whole year of company meals, and this salad is doing a specific job in that scheme: proving that a winter table could look like summer. The name comes from the French chiffonnade, literally something made of rags — in classical French cookery it means leaves shredded into ribbons, and in American cookbooks of this period "chiffonade salad" was stretched to cover any salad of finely cut mixed ingredients, usually arranged rather than tossed, and often finished with chopped egg or beet. What dates it is the parenthesis about Southern or hot-house tomatoes: refrigerated rail transport and Southern winter fields had made out-of-season produce a plausible extravagance for a middle-class Sunday dinner, and a hostess who put sliced tomato and grapefruit on the table in the dead of winter was making a quiet point about her market.