Home › Catsup, Pickles, Sauces and Salads › French Salad
French Salad
To 1 pint canned peas add 1 pint celery cut finely,½ cup walnuts chopped finely, ½ cup chopped orange. Serve with mayonnaise dressing on shredded lettuce. 1
A composed salad of the kind that filled ladies' luncheon menus a century ago: canned vegetables, nuts and fruit bound with mayonnaise. It needs almost no technique, but the proportions and a few unstated details are worth pinning down.
- The measures are by volumeA pint here means two cups, loose in the cup rather than packed. One pint of drained canned peas is roughly a 15-oz can and a half; two cups of finely diced celery is about four large ribs.
- Canned peas, and what to do with themDrain them well and rinse off the packing liquid, then let them sit in a sieve so the salad does not weep. Modern frozen peas, blanched a minute and chilled, hold their shape better if you prefer them.
- "Chopped orange"The text does not say how far to go: most likely the flesh only, segmented and stripped of membrane and pith, then chopped. A large navel orange gives roughly half a cup. If you chop over a bowl, adding the collected juice is optional -- it loosens the dressing.
- Cut the celery small"Finely" is doing real work: the celery is the only crisp element once the peas are soft, and coarse chunks will dominate. A scant quarter-inch dice matches the peas.
- Toast the walnutsToast the walnuts (optional) -- The recipe does not call for it, but five to seven minutes in a moderate oven (about 350F), then cooled, keeps them from going limp in the dressing and sharpens the flavour against the sweet peas and orange.
- Dress at the last minuteMayonnaise plus orange juice plus watery peas will slacken into soup if the bowl stands. Fold everything together just before it goes onto the lettuce.
- Yield and servingEnough for four to six as a side salad. "Shredded lettuce" here means a firm head lettuce -- crisphead types such as iceberg were available -- sliced into ribbons, and the wording ("on shredded lettuce") indicates a bed rather than tossing it through.
- The stray "1"The digit at the end is almost certainly a stray marker carried over in transcription -- a footnote, recipe or page number -- rather than an ingredient quantity.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and much of its content came from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, covering subjects well beyond baking. "French salad" in North American books of this period rarely meant anything French; the name was used loosely, generally for a salad served with a dressing. What is more clearly of its moment is the combination itself: canned peas were a proud convenience food, and salads combining fruit, chopped nuts and mayonnaise were fashionable in the early twentieth century -- the Waldorf salad, from New York hotel dining in the 1890s, began as apples and celery with mayonnaise, with walnuts becoming standard later. The result is a salad built to look composed on a plate rather than tossed in a bowl.