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Lettuce Cocktail
1 crisp head of lettuce, 4 tablespoons tomato catsup, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, 4 hard-cooked eggs, 4 tablespoons vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar, 4 small onions, and salt to taste. Cut lettuce fine with scissors and shred eggs and onions. Melt Crisco, when cool, add tomato catsup, Worcestershire sauce, sugar, vinegar and salt. At serving time pour this sauce over lettuce, eggs and onions. Serve very cold in cocktail glasses.
A chilled first-course salad dressed with a sweet-sour catsup sauce, served in stemmed glasses. The one thing to change is the fat.
- Crisco, melted, in a cold saladThe book was published to sell Crisco, which is why solid shortening turns up where oil belongs. Melted shortening sets again the moment it hits cold lettuce and cold eggs, leaving a waxy film. Use 2 tablespoons of a neutral oil and skip the melting step entirely.
- "Cocktail" here means a course, not a drinkIn early twentieth-century American service the term was commonly applied to small, sharply flavoured cold dishes opening the meal, usually served in a footed glass. Chill the glasses along with the salad.
- The sugarThree tablespoons against four of vinegar and four of catsup gives a distinctly sweet dressing in the period taste. Start with one tablespoon and add more to balance whatever vinegar you use; cider vinegar suits it better than white.
- Catsup has changedMany commercial tomato catsups of the era were less sweet and more assertively spiced (clove and allspice were common) than the modern bottle, though brands varied. Today's ketchup tends to push the dressing sweeter, another reason to hold back the sugar.
- "4 small onions"Small yellow or white onions, shredded raw, are aggressive in this quantity. Two shallots or four or five scallions, white and pale green, give the same bite without dominating.
- Cutting the lettuceThe recipe's scissors are worth following for fine, even shreds. Do it at the last moment, as the dressing wilts shredded lettuce within minutes.
- Hard-cooked eggs"shred" here most likely means grated or cut fine rather than chopped, which is what gives the dish its texture. Chill the eggs thoroughly first or they crumble to paste.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest roughly four cocktail glasses as a first course. Dress only at the moment of serving; it does not hold.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company launched in 1911. That accounts for the odd instruction to melt shortening for a cold salad dressing: the book's recipes were written to feature the product, whether or not it was the natural fat for the job. The dish itself belongs to a brief American vogue, roughly the 1900s through the 1920s, for the savory "cocktail" as a first course, a fashion usually linked to the oyster and fruit cocktails of hotel dining rooms and quickly extended to almost anything that could be chilled and spooned into a stemmed glass. The sweet-sour catsup-and-Worcestershire dressing is a relative of the same period's Thousand Island and "Russian" dressings, which likewise leaned on the bottled sauces then new to the American pantry.