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Some Salad Combinations
Either one of these dressings may be used in salad combinations familiar to every household, such as: No. 1. Lettuce, water cress and sliced hard-cooked eggs with or without a garnish of pimentoes, green peppers, or sliced beets.
No. 2. Two-thirds part of diced, cooked chicken, veal, tongue, or lamb with one-third part of diced celery, a few peas, a hint of onion juice, and any salad green.
No. 3. Two-thirds part of flaked, canned salmon, tuna fish, or diced shrimps with one-third part of shredded cabbage, diced celery, a few sliced olives and cress or lettuce. No. 4. Two-thirds part diced, warm potatoes with a little onion juice and minced parsley, put together with dressing to blend. When chilled, add one-third part of diced celery or the firm portion of cucumbers, diced, with or without a few chopped, toasted nut-meats, a little minced ham or mixed, cooked vegetables, or three sliced, hard-cooked eggs. Garnish with any salad green.
No. 5. Equal parts of diced, canned pineapple, stoned, canned or fresh cherries, fresh halved strawberries, or diced apple with or without a little shredded grapefruit or orange and some diced celery. Garnish with lettuce. If desired, this combination of fruit may be made into a Jellied Salad by stirring it into one and a half cupfuls of tart lemon jelly, when the latter is just about to congeal.
This is a formula rather than a fixed recipe: a set of ratios meant to be bound with one of the two dressings given earlier in the book (a boiled or cooked dressing and a mayonnaise-style one, both built on Snowdrift shortening or oil). The proportions still work, and a few of the details need translating.
- The two-thirds/one-third ruleCombinations Nos. 2, 3 and 4 are built as two parts protein or starch to one part crisp vegetable. It is a sound ratio and worth keeping; the celery is structural, not a garnish.
- Dress the potatoes warmNo. 4 hinges on this. Warm potatoes absorb dressing and onion juice; cold ones shed it and the salad tastes of raw dressing sitting on bland cubes. Chill only after the dressing is in, then fold in the celery or cucumber so it stays crisp.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid, or press a wedge in a garlic press. It gives sharpness without pieces of raw onion; the recipe asks only for a 'hint'.
- TongueCooked beef tongue was an ordinary cold-cut in the 1920s and is now a butcher order. Any firm cooked meat substitutes; the point is that it dices cleanly and holds its shape.
- PimentoesIn this period these are canned or jarred sweet red peppers, peeled and cooked soft, not the modern pickled sort in olives. Roasted red pepper from a jar is the closest match.
- Canned pineapple, not freshNo. 5 specifies canned pineapple, and if you make the jellied version that matters. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and leaves the salad a syrupy pool. Canned fruit has been heated enough to destroy the enzyme.
- "Tart lemon jelly"This means a lemon-flavored gelatin, set with sheet or powdered gelatin and sharpened with lemon juice, not preserves. Stir the fruit in when the jelly has thickened to raw egg white; earlier and the fruit sinks, later and it will not distribute.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening associated with the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and its cookbooks, issued through the 1910s and 1920s, existed to put the product into as many dishes as possible, dressings very much included. The page reflects a distinctly American moment in salad-making: the composed "combination salad" of cooked meat or canned fish bound with dressing, served on a lettuce leaf, which filled lunch and supper tables between the wars and depended on two newish conveniences, commercially canned salmon and tuna and reliably shelf-stable canned pineapple. The jellied variation at the end belongs to the same wave. Gelatin sold in measured envelopes had made molded salads a fixture of the domestic-science kitchen, and fruit-in-jelly recipes were a common feature of branded cookbooks of the period.