Shrimp Salad
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 can shrimps 1 cupful celery cut in cubes 1 cupful tart apples cut in cubes 1 cupful broken Brazil nut meats 1/2 cupful broken English walnut meats Salt and pepper to taste 1 lemon 4 tablespoonfuls vinegar 2 tablespoonfuls water 4 eggs 1 teaspoonful dry mustard 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful white pepper 1/2 cupful thick cream and 1 cupful whipped cream Crisp lettuce leaves Break shrimps into pieces, put them into earthenware dish, moisten with a little melted Crisco, season with vinegar, salt and pepper. Put apple cubes into a small dish and sprinkle lightly with lemon juice, then put in celery cubes with a little more lemon juice and toss together. Cover and set aside. Prepare nut meats. Heat vinegar and water in double boiler, beat eggs, then gradually add them to vinegar, stirring all the time. Now add Crisco and cook slowly, stirring constantly. Remove from fire, and beat till cold, then add mustard, salt, sugar, and pepper. Add the thick cream just before serving. When ready to serve toss nuts, celery, apples and shrimps together with a silver fork, and add a little dressing. Heap on crisp lettuce leaves on individual plates, and pour over each salad a heaping spoonful of the dressing; and top with spoonful of unsweetened whipped cream.
A composed fruit-and-nut salad of the Crisco era, dressed with a cooked egg dressing lightened with whipped cream. The dressing is the only technical part; everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: the cooked dressingThe egg-and-vinegar mixture must be cooked over water that is hot but not boiling, and stirred without pause until it coats a spoon — roughly the consistency of pouring custard, around 170F. Direct heat or a hard boil will scramble it into curds that no amount of beating will smooth.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated more than once since. Two tablespoons of any neutral solid or liquid fat behaves the same way here; the shortening is doing nothing that butter or a mild oil would not do.
- Canned shrimpThe recipe does not state a can size, and period cans varied. Rinse and drain well; canned shrimp carries a strong brine. Cooked and chilled fresh shrimp, coarsely broken, is a straight substitute.
- Two uses of Crisco, one quantityThe ingredient list gives 2 tablespoons but the method calls for it twice — melted over the shrimp, then again in the dressing. Split it, or measure 2 tablespoons for the dressing and use a teaspoon or so to moisten the shrimp.
- Brazil nutsBroken Brazil nut meats turn up in salads of this period and are still sold, usually shelled and raw. They are high in oil and go rancid quickly; buy them fresh and taste before adding. A brief toast improves them.
- The silver forkNot affectation. Steel cutlery of the period discolored cut apple and reacted with vinegar; silver did not. Any modern stainless fork is fine.
- Cream, two waysThe half cup of "thick cream" is heavy cream stirred into the cooled dressing; the cup of whipped cream is whipped separately, unsweetened, and spooned on at the table. Do not combine them in advance or the dressing loses its lift.
- Timing and yieldDress at the last moment; cut apple weeps and celery softens quickly once dressed. The recipe gives no yield, but the quantities suggest roughly four to six as a first course or luncheon salad.
This is a specimen of what might loosely be called a "combination salad": protein, crisp vegetable, fruit and nuts bound with a cooked or boiled dressing rather than a true mayonnaise. Boiled dressings, thickened with whole eggs and sharpened with vinegar, were the household standard well into the twentieth century, being far more forgiving than an emulsified mayonnaise and keeping better in an era of unreliable refrigeration. The recipe's insistence on Crisco marks the book's origins in the promotional cookery literature that Procter and Gamble published after the shortening's 1911 launch, in which recipes from pie crust to salad dressing were reworked to include it. The luxury signals — canned shrimp, Brazil nuts, whipped cream on each plate — belong to a period when the ladies' luncheon salad was a set piece of middle-class entertaining, meant to be built on the plate and admired before it was eaten.