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Shredded Salad
With a sharp pair of scissors shred green lettuce leaves and cabbage, arrange on a platter in alternate rings, first a ring of green and then the white cabbage. Garnish the top with slices of cucumber from the center of which pieces have been cut with a fancy vegetable cutter; the same shaped pieces are then cut from pimento slices and fitted into the cucumber, making a fancy red form in the center of each slice of cucumber. Cover with French dressing.
This is an assembly job rather than a cooking one, and its success is almost entirely a matter of keeping the shreds dry and the dressing late. A few of the terms and tools have shifted since it was written.
- Shredding with scissorsScissors work well on leaf lettuce, which bruises under a knife, but they are slow on cabbage. Quarter and core the cabbage and cut it fine with a knife or on a mandoline, then finish the lettuce with shears as directed.
- "Green lettuce"Read this as a loose-leaf or romaine type rather than a pale crisphead: leaf lettuce gives the darker green needed for contrast against the white cabbage.
- Dry everythingThe hinge of the dish. Wet shreds will not hold a ring shape and will thin the dressing into a puddle at the base of the platter. Spin or towel-dry the greens and cabbage thoroughly and chill them before arranging.
- PimentoSold in jars then as now, sweet red peppers roasted and peeled. Drained jarred roasted red pepper is the same thing; pat the pieces dry so they do not bleed pink into the cucumber.
- The fancy cutterCut the cucumber slices a good quarter inch thick or the inlaid pimento will fall through. A small aspic cutter or the smallest of a set of canapé cutters does the job; the recipe asks only for a 'fancy vegetable cutter'.
- French dressing, 1930s senseFrench dressing, older sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, salt, pepper, whisked and used at once. A third of a cup or so should dress a platter this size.
- Dress at the tableCover with dressing only as it goes out. Cabbage holds up, but the lettuce rings soften and the pattern is lost soon after being wetted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a medium head of cabbage and a large head of leaf lettuce will roughly fill a 12-inch platter, serving six to eight as a side.
Salads like this belong to a period when a cold supper was expected to look composed rather than tossed — concentric rings, inlaid garnishes, a platter carried whole to the table. The technique borrows from professional garde-manger work, where vegetable cutters were standard kit, and brings it into a domestic kitchen. The pimento was the period's shortcut to color: jarred, sweet, already peeled, and used in everything from cheese spreads to stuffed olives, largely because it supplied a red that little else in the pantry could. The book's premise — cook, and be cool — is the old summer problem of feeding people without heating the house, and a salad that gets its interest from arrangement rather than from anything on the stove is exactly the answer such books offered.