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Carrot Salad
Scrape, cut into slices and then into fancy shapes, 4 large carrots. Soak in cold water for 1/2 an hour, and then cook in boiling unsalted water until tender. Drain and dry. Line salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves, and arrange on top the carrots. Serve with following dressing: Rub sides and bottom of bowl with clove garlic, add salt and pepper to taste and 6 tablespoons melted Crisco; add piece of ice, if possible; stir until salt is dissolved, then add 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. Beat until thick; use at once.
A simple composed salad whose only real oddity is the dressing, which is built on melted shortening rather than oil. That single choice explains nearly every instruction in the second half of the recipe.
- Use oil, not melted CriscoHydrogenated shortening is solid at room temperature, so a dressing made with it sets into a waxy film the moment it meets cool carrots. Six tablespoons of olive oil or a neutral oil gives the same proportions and behaves properly; the ice, the beating and the "use at once" all exist to fight the shortening and become unnecessary.
- Why the recipe insists on speedMelted fat plus a little acid will hold as an emulsion only while it is being agitated and only until it cools. That is the hinge of the original method: dress and serve within a minute or two, or the dressing breaks and stiffens.
- Dressing ratioSix parts fat to one part vinegar or lemon juice is leaner in acid than most modern vinaigrettes. If you want it brighter, take it to 3:1 and season again after mixing.
- Unsalted cooking waterThe recipe specifies unsalted water without saying why. Salt does not toughen carrots, so salting the water is fine and improves them. Cook slices 5-8 minutes until just tender, not collapsing.
- The half-hour soakA cold soak will firm up limp, long-stored carrots, which may be what is behind the instruction. Fresh supermarket carrots gain little from it, and the step can be skipped.
- "Fancy shapes"Small aspic or truffle cutters, or a fluted channel knife run down the carrot before slicing, produce what the author intends. Cut before cooking, not after.
- Garlic in the bowlRubbing a cut clove around the bowl leaves a very faint perfume. If you want actual garlic flavour, grate a small clove into the acid and let it sit while you assemble the salad.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four large carrots will stretch to roughly four modest side salads. Dress immediately before it goes to the table.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911. That commercial purpose is visible here: the natural fat for a salad dressing is oil, and cottonseed oil was itself widely sold for salads, yet the recipe calls for the solidified, branded version and then adds ice and vigorous beating to cope with the consequences. Cooked-vegetable salads of this kind, carrots or beets or beans arranged on lettuce with a sharp dressing, were a fixture of Anglo-American tables in the 1910s, when "salad" more often meant something composed and dressed at the last moment than a bowl of raw leaves.