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Watercress and Egg Salad
Wash thoroughly, trim off roots, drain, and chill watercress. Arrange nests of the cress on individual salad plates. Cut four hard-cooked eggs in halves crosswise, in such a manner that tops of whites will be notched. Remove yolks, rub through a sieve, season with salt, pepper and moisten with Boiled Salad Dressing to the consistency to handle. Shape in balls the original size, dip in finely chopped parsley and replace in whites. Dispose one "cup" in each nest, and just before serving marinate with French Dressing. 2 cups rhubarb. 3/4 cup sugar.
A composed salad from the era when a plate was expected to look built rather than tossed. Nothing here is difficult, but two details in the original need translating.
- Ignore the last line"2 cups rhubarb. 3/4 cup sugar" appears to belong to a neighboring recipe and has been carried over into this one. There is no rhubarb in a watercress and egg salad.
- Notching the whitesCut the eggs crosswise with a small knife held at alternating angles, or make a series of short V-cuts around the equator, so the two halves separate with a zigzag rim. That is the "notch" — it makes each half read as a little cup rather than a bowl.
- Boiled Salad DressingA period cooked dressing thickened with egg, sometimes with flour or starch added, and sharpened with vinegar; closer to old-fashioned coleslaw dressing than to mayonnaise. The capitalised names suggest both it and the French Dressing are foundation recipes given elsewhere in the book; commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little vinegar will bind the yolks acceptably if you are not making the original.
- Yolk consistencyAdd the dressing a half teaspoon at a time. The yolk paste must be stiff enough to roll between the palms — too wet and it will not take the parsley coating or hold a ball shape.
- Marinate means dressIn period usage "marinate with French Dressing" simply means spoon the vinaigrette over. Do it at the table or moments before, since watercress wilts quickly once dressed.
- Chilling the cressStanding the trimmed bunches in cold water in the refrigerator for an hour makes the stems rigid, which is what lets them hold the nest shape. Spin or pat them thoroughly dry afterward or the dressing will slide off.
- YieldFour eggs, halved, give eight "cups"; the recipe puts one in each nest, so eight plates. Figure a generous handful of cress per serving.
Watercress was a spring green in the strictest sense: it came up in cold running water weeks before garden lettuce was ready. The stuffed-egg construction is pure turn-of-the-century American table style, when middle-class cookbooks taught the arrangement of food as carefully as its cooking, and a salad was judged on whether it stood up on the plate. Deviled or stuffed eggs are much older than this book, but the notched shell presented as a "cup" in a "nest" of greens reflects the period's fondness for edible tableaux — the same impulse that produced aspic molds and tomato baskets. The reliance on two named dressings from elsewhere in the volume is also characteristic: these books were written to be used whole, with foundation recipes cross-referenced rather than repeated.