Home › Salads › For Salad (Quart chopped apples pint)
For Salad (Quart chopped apples pint)
1 quart chopped apples 1 pint diced celery 1 1/2 cupfuls blanched and shredded almonds 2/3 cupful rolled pecan nut meats For salad. Mix apples, celery and nut meats.
For dressing. Melt Crisco, add mustard, sugar, salt, pepper, yolks of eggs well beaten, and lemon juice. Cook in double boiler till it thickens, then add whites of eggs stiffly beaten. Chill and add whipped cream just before serving. Dressing should be mixed with fruit.
A Waldorf-type salad with a cooked boiled dressing. The salad half is complete; the dressing half assumes you already know the proportions, so read the notes before you start.
- The dressing has no quantitiesThe method lists Crisco, mustard, sugar, salt, pepper, egg yolks, lemon juice, egg whites and whipped cream, but the original gives amounts for none of them. Use a standard boiled dressing formula rather than guessing: roughly 2 tablespoons fat, 1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1 tablespoon sugar, a teaspoon of salt, 3 yolks and 1/4 cup lemon juice, thinned with a little water or milk, will dress this volume of fruit.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell Crisco, so the shortening appears where an older cook would have used butter. Butter is the better choice here; it gives the dressing flavour that plain hydrogenated shortening cannot.
- Double boiler, and whyThe yolk mixture must thicken over water that is steaming, not boiling. Direct heat or a hard boil scrambles the yolks and the dressing breaks into curds that no amount of whisking will bring back. Stir constantly and pull it off when it coats a spoon.
- The beaten whitesWhites folded into a hot base are warmed but not reliably cooked. If that matters in your household, use pasteurized eggs, or cook the yolk base to 160F on a thermometer before folding.
- "Rolled" pecan meatsIn books of this period "rolled" most likely means crushed under a rolling pin rather than ground. Aim for irregular pieces with some texture, not pecan meal.
- Blanched almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Shred them lengthwise with a knife while still damp; dried blanched almonds split and crumble.
- Keep the apples paleA quart of chopped apple browns fast. Toss the pieces in some of the lemon juice from the dressing as you cut them, and dress the salad no more than an hour before serving.
- Assembly orderChill the cooked dressing thoroughly, then fold in the whipped cream at the last moment, as directed. Cream folded into a warm base deflates and weeps.
- YieldThe solids come to roughly two quarts, so around two to two and a half quarts once dressed; enough for eight to ten as a side course.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; that is why a shortening appears in a salad dressing where butter would be the obvious fat. The salad itself is a descendant of the Waldorf, generally traced to Oscar Tschirky at New York's Waldorf Hotel in the 1890s, which in its earliest form was only apples, celery and mayonnaise. Nuts were a later addition and had become common by the time this book appeared. The cooked or "boiled" dressing, thickened with egg yolk over hot water and lightened with whipped cream, was the American alternative to a whisked mayonnaise: cheaper in oil, more stable in a warm kitchen, and sweet-sour in a way that suited fruit salads of this kind.