French-Bean-and-Celery Salad

A two-vegetable salad that depends entirely on texture: crisp acidulated celery over cold, properly drained beans. The original assumes a cook who will finish it with a dressing of her own choosing.

• French beansThese are ordinary green beans picked young and slender — what a market now sells as haricots verts or fine beans. The recipe does not say whether the pods are left whole or cut; beans this young need only a few minutes in well-salted boiling water.
• Stop the cookingDrain the beans and drop them straight into ice water, then dry them thoroughly. Beans left to cool in their own heat go olive-drab and limp, which defeats the point of the dish.
• The soaking liquidHalf a cup of lemon juice with half a cup of water for each half cup of diced celery is a full immersion, not a dressing. It firms and lightly pickles the celery; drain it well before plating or the salad will be sour and wet.
• Lemon quantityAn hour in that much acid is aggressive by current taste. Cutting the juice to a quarter cup against three quarters of a cup of water gives crispness without stripping the celery's flavor.
• CeleryUse the pale inner ribs. Older outer stalks need their strings pulled off with a peeler, or the quarter-inch dice will be fibrous.
• No dressing is givenThe recipe stops without one. A plain French dressing of three parts oil to one of vinegar, salt and pepper, spooned over the beans just before serving, suits it; mayonnaise also works, but it masks the celery.
• YieldThe recipe gives no yield and no quantity for the beans; it is written as a ratio, half a cupful of celery to a cupful of soaking liquid, and scales as you like. Assemble at the last minute, as the lettuce leaf wilts under dressed beans.