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Endive, Celery and Green Pepper Salad
Select crisp, well-bleached heads of endive, separate the leaves, keeping the green leaves separate from the bleached; wash and dry. Dispose the leaves on individual plates of ample size. Arrange the green leaves first, then the bleached leaves until a nest has been formed; fill the centers with the hearts of celery cut in one-half inch pieces. Cut a slice from the stem end of crisp red and green peppers, remove the seeds and veins and cut in the thinnest shreds possible, using the shears. Strew these shreds over each portion and, just before serving, marinate each with French Dressing. 3/4 cup sugar. 1/3 cup water.
A composed winter salad from the era when celery was a luxury and a salad was arranged rather than tossed. Most of the work is in the drying and the cutting.
- The stray line at the end"3/4 cup sugar. 1/3 cup water." belongs to nothing in this salad; it appears to be a fragment carried over from a neighbouring recipe. Ignore it; there is no sugar in the dish.
- Which endiveThe reference to green outer leaves and bleached inner ones points to curly endive or escarole, the broad chicory heads that market gardeners blanched by tying or covering them. Witloof (Belgian endive) will also work and is uniformly pale — in that case buy a head of frisée as well if you want the two-tone nest the recipe describes.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Oil will not cling to a wet leaf, and the dressing slides to the plate leaving the salad naked. Spin or blot the leaves until they squeak, and chill them until stiff.
- Celery heartsThe pale inner ribs only, cut in half-inch pieces. Old celery was often blanched in trenches and much milder; a modern supermarket stalk from the outside of the bunch is stringier and stronger, so peel it or stick to the heart as instructed.
- Peppers and shearsRed and green sweet bell peppers, seeds and white veins removed. Cutting the shreds with kitchen scissors rather than a knife gives finer threads without crushing them — the instruction is sound and worth following.
- French DressingIn 1913 this means oil and vinegar, roughly three to one, with salt and pepper, shaken or beaten just before use. It is not the sweet orange bottled product that later took the name.
- Marinate at the table"Just before serving" is literal. Dressed chicory wilts quickly, so dress at the last moment.
- YieldAs written it makes individual plates — figure one small head of endive and one celery heart for every two people, with one red and one green pepper enough for six servings.
Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) sets a full menu for each week of the year, a winter course of the kind a cook had to build out of whatever kept in a cold cellar or came from the forcing bed. Chicory and celery were both grown blanched — hilled with soil, wrapped in paper, or buried in a trench — to draw out bitterness and produce the pale, tender hearts the recipe insists on; celery in particular was a status vegetable, presented upright in cut-glass vases on American dining tables well into the century. The shredded red and green peppers here are doing decorative work more than culinary, which is characteristic of Hiller's style: she was associated with the Chicago Domestic Science Training School and wrote for an audience arranging food on plates for company, where the nest of leaves and the scatter of bright shreds mattered as much as the flavor.