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Chiffonade Salad
Have 1 cupful each of lettuce, celery, and chicory cut into shreds, and 1 tablespoonful each of chopped beets, onion, parsley, tarragon, and sweet red pepper. Mix all together with a French dressing, and serve on lettuce leaves with a garnish of sliced tomatoes.
A straightforward tossed salad whose only real technique is the knife work its name describes. The measurements are loose by design; treat them as proportions rather than absolutes.
- Chiffonade means the cutStack the lettuce and chicory leaves, roll them tightly, and slice crosswise into fine ribbons. Celery is cut into matching thin shreds on the bias rather than the usual crescents.
- ChicoryIn American books of this period chicory usually means curly endive (frisée), not Belgian endive or the roasted root used in coffee. Escarole works as well and is less aggressively bitter.
- Sweet red pepperA fresh red bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped. Jarred pimiento, drained and blotted, was widely available at the time and still gives the intended sweetness and colour.
- BeetsCooked beets, not raw. Chop them last and fold them in at the very end, or they will bleed and turn the whole bowl pink.
- TarragonA tablespoon of chopped fresh tarragon is a great deal against three cups of greens. Half that is safer unless you want the anise note to dominate; dried tarragon should be reduced to about a teaspoon.
- OnionA tablespoon chopped fine, ideally from a mild sweet or red onion. Rinsing the chopped onion in cold water and draining it well removes the harsh edge that would otherwise sit on top of the dressing.
- French dressingAt this date that means a simple vinaigrette of roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Two to three tablespoons is enough.
- Timing and yieldDress immediately before serving; shredded greens wilt within minutes under vinegar. The recipe gives no yield, but the quantities would fill roughly four small salad plates.
Chiffonade is French for something like "made of rags" — the word describes leaves rolled and sliced into thin ribbons, a cut still used for basil and sorrel. In French professional cookery it appears chiefly as a garnish of shredded greens, and the term turns up in American household books around the turn of the twentieth century, a period when hotel and restaurant French carried real prestige. The recipe is characteristic of the moment in another way: it leans on chopped beets, pimiento and parsley for colour on the plate, and finishes with a ring of sliced tomatoes, at a time when a salad was judged as much by its appearance on the table as by its taste.