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Decorated Apple Salad
Use rather large eating apples, peel, core, and cut in slices. Around the edge of the apple put a ring of grated raw carrot, inside this a ring of raw grated beet, in the center a tablespoonful of stiff mayonnaise, colored pale green. Serve on individual plates garnished with shredded lettuce.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the instructions are essentially a diagram, and the only real technique is keeping the apple from browning and the mayonnaise stiff enough to hold its shape.
- Read "slices" as ringsPeeling and coring first, then arranging rings of carrot and beet around the edge with mayonnaise in the center, only works on a thick crosswise slice with the cored hole in the middle. Cut about 1/2 inch thick, one slice per plate, and use the widest slices from the middle of the fruit.
- Stop the browningThe original says nothing about it, but peeled apple discolors within minutes. Brush or dip the slices in lemon juice or acidulated water and drain them before assembling, or the white background the whole design depends on will be beige.
- Pale green mayonnaiseGreen tint of this kind was commonly got from spinach or watercress pounded and pressed for its juice, or from bottled vegetable coloring. A teaspoon of very finely chopped chives, parsley or watercress blitzed into the mayonnaise gives the tint and some flavor; a drop of food coloring gives color alone.
- Stiff means stiffA tablespoon of mayonnaise has to sit in the core hole without slumping. Homemade mayonnaise thickened with an extra yolk, or commercial mayonnaise chilled well, holds; thinned or "salad dressing" style products will run into the carrot.
- Grate dryGrate the carrot and beet on the coarse side of a box grater and blot the beet on paper towel. Wet beet bleeds into the apple and the mayonnaise almost immediately, so assemble it last and serve at once.
- Beet is raw hereRaw grated beet, not cooked or pickled, so it is firmer and less juicy and bleeds less onto the plate. Peel it and grate it directly onto the plate if you want to keep your hands and board clean.
- YieldOne apple gives two or three usable slices, so figure one apple for two servings. Firm, sweet-tart eating apples hold their shape best; a mealy variety collapses under the grated vegetables.
Decorated salads like this belong to the era when a salad was expected to be built rather than tossed, and judged first by how it looked on the plate. American cookbooks and home economics teaching from the 1910s through the 1940s are full of these concentric and molded arrangements, served on a bed of shredded lettuce that functioned as decoration more than as food. The raw grated carrot and beet reflect a genuine nutritional enthusiasm of the period for uncooked vegetables, promoted as a way to preserve vitamins that boiling was widely believed to destroy.