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Waldorf Salad
1 quart chopped apples, 2 cups diced celery, 1 1/2 cups blanched and shredded almonds, and 2/3 cup rolled pecan nut meats.
Dress with following dressing, adding little more sugar and lemon juice to taste, just before serving. Mix 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1 teaspoon each mustard and white sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Add 2 well beaten egg yolks and then beat in slowly 4 tablespoons lemon juice. Cook in double boiler till it thickens. Then add whites 2 eggs beaten stiff. Keep on ice till wanted. Stir in 1 cup whipped cream just before serving. This is very good made with 5 egg yolks and 1/2 cup thin cream if whipping cream is unobtainable.
A cooked boiled dressing rather than mayonnaise, lightened with whipped cream — closer to a dessert salad than the mayonnaise-bound version most people know. The dressing is where all the technique lives.
- The hinge: the double boilerThe yolk mixture must thicken over water that is hot but not boiling, around 170-180F, and it wants constant stirring. Direct heat or a hard boil will scramble the yolks into grains that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Raw whites and creamThe stiff whites and the whipped cream go in uncooked and the salad is then held cold, so nothing pasteurizes them. Use pasteurized shell eggs or carton whites if you are serving anyone very young, pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold in the US. One tablespoon melted is simply a neutral fat here; a mild oil does the same job and stays liquid when chilled, whereas melted shortening can leave a faint waxy coating on the tongue in a cold dressing.
- A quart of applesA quart of chopped apple is about 4 cups, roughly four medium apples. Something crisp and tart holds its shape — the fruit should be cut no earlier than it has to be and tossed at once with a little of the lemon juice to keep it pale.
- "Rolled" pecansRolled most likely means crushed under a rolling pin rather than chopped, giving coarse irregular pieces. Blanching almonds means slipping the skins after a minute in boiling water; supermarket blanched slivered almonds are close enough.
- "Keep on ice"The refrigerator. Chill the cooked base thoroughly before folding in whites and cream, or the whipped cream will slacken and weep.
- The variation at the endFive yolks with half a cup of thin cream stand in for two yolks and the whipped cream, giving a richer, more custard-like dressing with less lift. "Thin cream" is roughly what would now be sold as light cream.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of dressed salad, enough for eight to ten as a side. Dress only what will be eaten; the apples soften and the cream thins within a few hours.
The salad is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s and associated with Oscar Tschirky, the hotel's maître d'hôtel, whose published version was nothing more than apples, celery and mayonnaise. Nuts were not in that first formula; they were added over the following decades and were well established by the 1920s. This version shows the dish at an interesting halfway point: the nuts are in, but the binder is not mayonnaise. It is a cooked boiled dressing of the kind found in American home cookery when raw-oil emulsions were considered fussy or extravagant, sweetened and sharpened with lemon and lifted with whipped cream. Crisco reached American grocers in 1911, which places the recipe firmly in the twentieth century.