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Bavarian Salad
Shred very fine two heads of lettuce, chop two onions fine and cut one cold beet into cubes. Make a layer of the lettuce, toss together the beets and onion and pile on the lettuce. Marinate with a French dressing, pour over the top an oil mayonnaise and garnish with sliced olives.
A straightforward composed salad from the era when "French dressing" meant oil and vinegar and nothing else. A few of its terms and proportions need translating.
- French dressingIn this period the phrase means a simple vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Oil mayonnaiseThe qualifier distinguishes true emulsified mayonnaise from the boiled or cooked "salad dressings" of the period, which were thickened with egg and flour. Any good mayonnaise works; thin it with a spoonful of vinegar or cream so it pours rather than sits in a lump.
- Two onions is a lotRaw onion at that quantity will dominate two heads of lettuce. One small red or sweet onion, sliced paper-thin, is closer to the intended effect; soaking the slices in cold water for ten minutes takes the harshness off.
- The cold beetA beet boiled or roasted until tender, then cooled and peeled. Dress it separately if you want the salad to stay presentable, since beet juice bleeds into everything it touches within minutes.
- Dress at the last momentFinely shredded lettuce collapses fast under vinaigrette. Assemble the layers, then marinate and spoon over the mayonnaise immediately before it goes to the table.
- OlivesThe recipe specifies only "sliced olives"; green olives in brine were the usual default in American cookbooks of the period. Modern canned black olives are milder and will read as decoration rather than seasoning.
- YieldTwo heads of lettuce serves six to eight as a side salad.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks attached national names to salads with a free hand, and "Bavarian" here probably signals nothing more precise than the beet-and-onion combination that was associated with German and Central European tables. Beetroot with raw onion in vinegar is genuinely a staple of German cookery, and the large German-immigrant population in American cities kept such flavors familiar. Notable too is the double dressing: vinaigrette first to marinate, then mayonnaise poured over the top. The layered, piled, garnished construction belonged to a period when a salad was often expected to be built and looked at rather than tossed in a bowl, and household cookery books of the day gave the salad course some attention as presentation.