Waldorf Salad
1 cup sliced apples 1 cup celery diced 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup walnut meats broken in pieces 1 cup Mayonnaise or boiled dressing Mix lightly apples, celery and nuts, being careful not to crush the fruit, sprinkle with salt and add dressing.
A very early printed form of the salad, before grapes and raisins crept in. Two things need attention: the lemon juice is listed but never assigned a job, and a full cup of dressing will drown two cups of fruit and celery.
- Put the lemon juice to workToss the sliced apples in the tablespoon of lemon juice first, before adding anything else. The method never says what to do with it, and if it goes in at the end it does nothing about the browning that starts within minutes of cutting.
- Dressing quantityOne cup of mayonnaise to one cup of apple and one cup of celery is a heavy hand by modern standards, though generous dressing was usual in salads of this kind. Start with a third of a cup and add more only to coat; the rest can go to the table separately.
- Boiled dressingThe alternative named here is a cooked flour-and-egg dressing thickened on the stove and sharpened with vinegar, standard in American cookbooks of this era and tangier and lighter than mayonnaise. Any modern cooked salad dressing stands in for it.
- ApplesThe recipe says only "sliced" and does not specify thickness. Pieces substantial enough to hold their shape suit the instruction about not crushing the fruit. A firm tart-sweet apple that holds up — Braeburn, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith — helps. Nor does the recipe say whether to peel: leave the peel on for colour or take it off for a paler look.
- Walnut meatsSimply shelled walnuts. Broken by hand rather than chopped, so the pieces stay large. Toasting them five to eight minutes at 350F is not in the recipe but improves them considerably, particularly if the nuts have been in the cupboard a while.
- Assembly and timingFold rather than stir, and dress it no more than an hour before serving. Celery weeps, apples soften, and the dressing thins as it sits.
- YieldAbout four small salad servings as a course on its own, or six as a garnish alongside cold meat or poultry.
The salad is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s and to its maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky, whose own 1896 cookbook gives a version of just apples, celery and mayonnaise — the walnuts, now inseparable from the name, were a later addition. A salad born in a Fifth Avenue dining room had become something a home cook was expected to recognise by name. The heavy hand with mayonnaise is often said to be characteristic of the period.