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Apple Salad
Chop an equal quantity of apples and cabbage and stir into them a cream dressing. The juice of the apples will greatly dilute the dressing, so do not use too much. The apples should be chopped only a short time before using. A few minced nut meats sprinkled over the top are a pleasing addition.
A two-ingredient salad that stands or falls on the dressing, and on how recently the apples were cut. The instruction that matters most is the one about dilution: apples shed a surprising amount of juice, so the dressing should go on thick and sparing.
- "Cream dressing"In books of this period the term usually points to a cooked or boiled dressing (egg, vinegar, sugar, mustard, thickened with flour or cornstarch and thinned with cream), though some books use it for a simpler uncooked mixture of cream and vinegar; this recipe does not say which. Commercial mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of sour cream and a pinch of sugar and mustard is the closest ready substitute.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Half a small green cabbage, finely shredded, and two to three firm apples chopped to the same size gives roughly six side servings, with about half a cup of dressing.
- Chop the apples lastThe advice is sound and worth obeying literally. Cut apple begins weeping and browning within minutes; have the cabbage shredded, the dressing mixed and the bowl ready before the first apple is quartered.
- BrowningA squeeze of lemon over the chopped apple slows discolouration without noticeably changing the flavour, and the acid works with the dressing rather than against it.
- Apple choiceUse a firm, tart variety that holds its shape — Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Braeburn. Soft mealy apples collapse into the cabbage and release even more liquid.
- Peel or notThe original is silent. Leaving the skin on a red apple gives the only colour in an otherwise pale dish; peeling gives a softer texture throughout.
- The nutsThe recipe says only "nut meats"; walnuts suit it well, as would pecans or almonds. Toast them briefly and add at the table, since they soften once they sit in the dressing.
- TimingDress and serve within half an hour. Held longer, the cabbage weeps as well and the salad sits in a thin puddle.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and like other milling-company books it collected household recipes beyond baking, salads among them. The apple-and-cabbage pairing belongs to the same early twentieth-century enthusiasm for raw fruit in salads that produced the Waldorf, generally traced to the New York hotel of that name in the 1890s; where the Waldorf used celery, thriftier and more northerly kitchens reached for cabbage, which kept well in a cellar alongside the apple barrel. Boiled and "cream" dressings of this kind were widely used in North American home cooking before jarred mayonnaise became common, and cookbooks of the era commonly printed such a dressing in its own place rather than repeating it under every salad.