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Pepper and Onion Salad
Plunge a bright-red bell pepper (Ruby King) into boiling water, remove immediately and rub off the outer "shiny" skin. Cover with ice water to chill and become crisp. Cut a slice from the stem end and remove the seeds and veins, then cut in rings as thin as possible. Cut one small Spanish onion in very thin slices, separate the rings and "crisp" in ice water. Drain and toss together both onion and pepper rings. Season with salt, pepper, and pour over two tablespoons oil and one tablespoon vinegar. Crush the pepper and onion into the dressing, then pile it in nests of crisp lettuce heart leaves.
A raw salad that depends almost entirely on texture, so the two soaking steps matter more than anything else in the method.
- Ruby KingAn heirloom sweet bell pepper, large and deep red, still sold by seed companies but not by supermarkets. Any thick-walled red bell pepper does the same job; choose one that feels heavy and has no soft shoulders.
- The blanch is for peeling onlyA second or two in boiling water loosens the waxy outer skin so it rubs off with a towel. Leave it in any longer and the flesh begins to soften, which defeats the point of the salad.
- Ice waterThe recipe gives no time, but a soak long enough to chill through makes both pepper and onion audibly crisp and draws some of the sulphur bite out of the onion. Drain thoroughly, or the dressing will slide off.
- Spanish onionThe large, pale, mild variety, not a yellow cooking onion. A sweet onion or a red onion sliced paper-thin is the nearest modern equivalent.
- "Crush" the vegetablesThis means pressing and turning the rings in the dressing with a spoon or your hands so they bruise slightly and take up the oil and vinegar, not mashing them to a pulp. It is the step that turns two separate ingredients into a salad.
- The dressingTwo parts oil to one part vinegar is sharper than the modern default of three to one. Use a plain neutral or light olive oil and a cider or white wine vinegar; taste before adding more salt, since salt draws water from the onion and thins the dressing.
- Salt lateIf you salt the rings while they sit, they will weep and go limp. Season as you dress, and serve within a few minutes of assembling.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one pepper and one small onion will fill roughly four lettuce cups as a side salad.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the wave of early twentieth-century cookbooks issued by baking powder and flour companies to promote their products, and its menus are organised week by week through the year. This salad appears among the September menus, a time when sweet peppers come in heavily in the northern United States, and named varieties like Ruby King were still something a cook might specify at market or grow in a kitchen garden. Raw pepper salads are often said to have been a relatively new idea at the time: sweet bells are generally thought to have been stuffed, pickled or cooked down through much of the nineteenth century, and serving them uncooked in rings with an oil-and-vinegar dressing reflects the period's growing enthusiasm for crisp, cold "made" salads served in lettuce cups, a presentation that ran through American hotel and club dining for decades.