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Celery Salad
— Mrs. A. C. Fancher
Cut celery in small pieces. Mash yolks of two hard-boiled eggs with tablespoon melted butter and one teaspoon prepared mustard. Add salt and pepper, one-half cup vinegar; stir in whites of eggs chopped fine, and pour all over celery.
— Miss Gertrude Gardner
A cooked-egg dressing of the kind that preceded bottled mayonnaise on most American tables. The receipt gives no quantity of celery and no yield, so both need judgment.
- Quantity of celeryTwo egg yolks, a tablespoon of butter and half a cup of vinegar will dress roughly one large head of celery, about 4 cups sliced. That serves four to six as a side salad.
- The vinegar is the variableHalf a cup is a great deal of acid for two yolks, and the vinegar of the period, often home-made, may well have been weaker and softer than today's 5 percent distilled. Start with a quarter cup, taste, and add more; the dressing should coat the celery, not pool under it.
- Melted butter will setButter poured over cold celery firms into flecks almost at once. Have the butter warm but not hot, mash it into the yolks first so they emulsify, and dress the salad shortly before serving rather than hours ahead.
- Prepared mustardIn this period prepared mustard generally meant a plain, sharp yellow-brown table mustard, probably closer to a mild English or a Dijon than to modern bright-yellow American mustard. Either of those gives a truer result.
- Hard-boiled eggsYolks that are dry and crumbly mash into the butter more smoothly than wet ones. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then a cold-water bath, is enough.
- Prepare the celeryString the outer ribs with a peeler and cut on the diagonal into half-inch pieces. Crisping the cut celery in ice water for twenty minutes and drying it well keeps the dressing from being diluted.
- SeasoningWith no sugar and no oil, the balance rests entirely on salt. Season the dressing itself until it tastes slightly too salty on a spoon, since the celery is bland and watery.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in the late nineteenth century, grown in trenches and blanched with boards or paper, and often set on the table upright in a tall cut-glass vase so guests could see it. New York State was a serious celery region. The dressing here is a cold cousin of the boiled dressings that filled American cookbooks before commercial mayonnaise became common: hard yolks, fat, mustard and vinegar worked together, with the chopped whites stirred back in so nothing is wasted. Community cookbooks like this one collected such receipts under contributors' names, and the double attribution at the head and foot of this entry may well reflect the fact that these books were assembled by hand, from slips of paper, with the occasional printer's confusion left standing.