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Celery and Almond Salad
1 cupful melted Crisco 1 yolk of egg 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 1 tablespoonful vinegar 1 head celery 1/2 cupful blanched almonds 1 crisp lettuce Few drops green color 1/2 teaspoonful sugar 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful mustard Red pepper to taste Melt and cool Crisco. Prepare celery and cut into very thin strips and plunge in ice water until wanted. Blanch and shred almonds; wash and dry lettuce leaves. Put yolk of egg into bowl, add mustard, salt, and red pepper and mix well with wooden spoon. Add sugar, teaspoonful lemon juice, teaspoonful vinegar; beat in Crisco gradually. Remove spoon and beat with egg beater five minutes, then beat in rest of lemon juice and vinegar. Add more seasonings if needed and enough green color to make it look pretty. Dry celery and mix with almonds, then toss them into dressing. Serve on lettuce leaves.
A hand-beaten mayonnaise built on melted shortening rather than oil, tinted green and folded through celery and almonds. Most of the work is in the dressing, and one choice there decides whether the salad is pleasant or waxy.
- Use oil, not melted shorteningCrisco emulsifies well while warm but sets firm as it cools, so a dressing made with it turns pasty and coats the tongue with fat once the salad is chilled. A cup of a neutral oil — sunflower, grapeseed, light olive — gives the same volume and stays fluid.
- If you do use shortening, keep it barely warmMelt it and let it cool to just above setting point. Hot fat will cook the yolk and the emulsion will never take; fat that has begun to firm up will seize into lumps as it hits the cold yolk.
- The raw yolkNothing in this dressing is cooked. Use a very fresh egg, or a pasteurized one if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished salad refrigerated.
- Add the fat drop by drop at firstThe recipe says "beat in Crisco gradually" and means it literally. One yolk will carry a cup of fat only if the first few tablespoons go in a little at a time; after that you can pour in a thin steady stream.
- Ingredient names"Mustard" here is dry mustard powder, not prepared. "Red pepper" is cayenne — a pinch. "Few drops green color" is cosmetic and can be left out entirely; if you want it, a drop of liquid food coloring or a spoonful of blanched-and-pureed parsley or spinach will do.
- Blanching almondsPour boiling water over shelled almonds, leave one minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Shred them while still damp and soft — dry blanched almonds split rather than slice.
- Celery in ice waterThe recipe just says "until wanted"; half an hour or so in ice water does make thin-cut celery crisp, and it curls slightly. Dry it thoroughly on a towel or the dressing will thin and slide off.
- Yield and dressingA cup of fat plus a yolk makes something over a cup and a quarter of mayonnaise, more than one head of celery needs. Dress the salad lightly and keep the rest covered and refrigerated for a day or two. The salad probably serves four to six.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911 — which is why a cupful of melted shortening stands where a cook might otherwise expect olive oil or salad oil. The point of such books was to show that the new product could go everywhere butter, lard and oil had gone, including into cold mayonnaise, where it does not really belong. Celery was a fashionable and fairly expensive salad vegetable in the American 1910s, often said to have been served upright in the tall cut-glass vases of late-Victorian table fashion, and pairing it with blanched almonds and a tinted mayonnaise was the sort of thing a hostess did for a luncheon course. The green coloring is a reminder that food dye was then read as refinement rather than artifice.