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Lettuce, Radish and Onion Salad
Remove the leaves from the stalk, discarding all wilted and unsightly leaves. Wash and keep in cold water until crisp. Drain and dry on a crash towel or cheese cloth. Place between leaves thin slices of round, red radishes, sprinkle with finely sliced young green onions. Garnish with radishes cut to resemble tulips. Serve with French Dressing. 5 tart apples. 1/2 cup sugar. 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
A straightforward assembly salad from the September chapter, where lettuce, radishes and green onions would all still be coming out of the kitchen garden. The instructions are complete except for the dressing, which the book gives elsewhere.
- The stray ingredientsThe "5 tart apples, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg" at the end are a fragment of a neighbouring recipe (an apple dish of some sort) that has run on into this one. They have nothing to do with the salad; ignore them.
- A crash towelCrash is a coarse, loosely woven linen once standard for kitchen towels. Any lint-free cotton towel works, or a salad spinner followed by a brief pat dry.
- Dry leaves are the hingeFrench dressing is oil and acid with nothing to emulsify it, so it slides off wet lettuce and pools in the bowl. The crisping soak and the thorough drying are the whole technique here.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled product. In this period it means roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken just before serving.
- Radish tulipsCut four or five shallow petal-shaped slices around a trimmed round radish, leaving each attached at the base, then sit them in ice water for 20 to 30 minutes. The cuts open outward as the flesh firms.
- Young green onionsScallions, sliced thin. Onions this early are mild; a mature onion sliced the same way will dominate the plate.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, two good heads of leaf lettuce, a bunch of radishes and three or four scallions will fill a salad bowl for a family dinner. Assemble and dress at the table or immediately before it goes out.
52 Sunday Dinners is organised as fifty-two Sunday menus running through the year, and this salad falls in September, plausibly because that is when a home garden in the northern United States delivers lettuce, radishes and green onions together in the second cool flush after summer heat. Green salads of this kind were still a relatively recent fixture on American Sunday tables; through much of the nineteenth century lettuce was as often wilted with hot bacon fat or sugar and vinegar as served raw, and the spread of the crisp, plainly dressed leaf salad is often attributed to the arrival of reliable oils and the influence of French service. The radish carved to resemble a tulip belongs to the same era's enthusiasm for garnish, when a dish was expected to be looked at before it was eaten and cookbooks routinely instructed the cook to shape vegetables into flowers, fans and chains.