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Bird's Nest Salad
Cut petsai hearts into shreds, arrange them on a platter in small nest shapes, and into each nest put three or four small eggs made of cream cheese, colored a delicate green. Sprinkle a little black pepper on one side of each egg. Pass with this both French and mayonnaise salad dressing.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, and it stands or falls on the cheese "eggs" holding their shape. Everything can be prepared an hour or two ahead and kept cold.
- PetsaiSold today as napa cabbage, wong bok or Chinese leaf. Use only the pale, tightly furled hearts, shredded fine; the outer green leaves are too coarse and too wet to hold a nest shape.
- Shaping the nestsToss the shreds with a spoonful of dressing first so they cling, then coil each portion into a ring on the platter. Dry shreds slide apart the moment the plate is carried.
- The cream cheese eggsFull-fat block cream cheese, worked smooth and chilled hard, rolls into small ovals between the palms; spreadable tub cheese has too much water and will slump. Roll them, then refrigerate at least 30 minutes before they go on the nests.
- Colouring greenBottled vegetable colourings were on sale by 1930 and are the likeliest thing a cook would have used here. Two or three drops of green food colouring kneaded into the cheese does the same, or a teaspoon of very finely chopped parsley or spinach puree for a paler, more natural tint.
- The pepperThe recipe asks only for a little black pepper on one side of each egg, which reads more as speckling on a bird's egg than as seasoning. A coarser grind suits that effect; fine pepper just looks dirty.
- Both dressingsFrench dressing here means the period vinaigrette — oil, vinegar, salt, paprika — not a sweet orange bottled one. The recipe has both dressings passed at table rather than dressing the salad, which keeps the arrangement intact.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities. As a working estimate, one nest of three or four eggs per person; a single large head of napa and 8 oz of cream cheese should stretch to six to eight servings, with the "eggs" made small.
Novelty salads of this kind were a staple of the American ladies' luncheon between the wars, when presentation counted heavily: aspic rings, stuffed tomato "apples", cheese moulded into shapes it had no business taking. The bird's nest conceit — shredded greens as straw, small pale ovoids as eggs — turns up in period cookery writing, here with cheese standing in for the eggs. The petsai is the most datable element: Chinese cabbage had been grown commercially in the United States by Chinese-American market gardeners well before 1930, and by then it had moved far enough into mainstream produce that a party book could name it without a word of explanation.