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Apple-and-Celery Salad
Lay 1 cupful of celery cut into bits in iced water. Peel 4 good-sized apples and cut them into small dice, dropping them in the water as you do so. Drain the celery and sprinkle it with salt. Drain the apples, mix with the celery, and pour over all a mayonnaise dressing.
A two-ingredient salad that lives or dies on crispness and on the dressing you bring to it. The original assumes you have mayonnaise on hand and gives no quantity for it.
- The hinge: cold waterBoth the celery and the diced apple go straight into iced water, which crisps the celery and keeps cut apple from browning. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough; longer and the apple turns waterlogged and flat.
- A squeeze of acidPlain iced water slows browning but does not stop it. A tablespoon of lemon juice in the soaking water holds the colour reliably and does not read as sour in the finished salad.
- CupfulA cupful here is a standard 8 fl oz measure of cut celery, roughly two to three ribs. Cut the bits small enough to sit on a fork alongside the apple dice.
- Choosing applesFour good-sized apples is about 1 1/2 lb. Use a firm, tart-sweet variety that holds its shape -- Braeburn, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith. Soft mealy apples collapse into the dressing.
- Dry before dressingDrain thoroughly and pat dry in a towel. Water clinging to the fruit thins mayonnaise on the plate and the salad goes soupy within minutes.
- How much dressingNo quantity is given. About 1/2 cup of mayonnaise coats this amount; thin it with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice if it sits too heavily. Dress immediately before serving.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseIf you make mayonnaise from scratch rather than using a jar, the eggs are not cooked. Use pasteurised eggs where the salad will be served to children, older guests or anyone pregnant.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a side. Salads of this kind were often sent to table on lettuce leaves, and toasted walnuts or halved grapes are a plausible addition.
Apple and celery dressed with mayonnaise is the plain ancestor of what is now generally called Waldorf salad, a combination usually traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s; walnuts came later and are not part of the earliest versions. Mayonnaise-bound fruit and vegetable salads were fashionable at luncheon tables in this period. Celery was itself a prestige vegetable in the late nineteenth century, sold in tall glass celery vases and set out on the table as an ornament as much as a food.