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Celery Salad
Cut the tender stalks of celery into inch pieces to make three cups, marinate with a French dressing. Serve in a ring of tomato jelly, and garnish with curled celery, shredded lettuce and mayonnaise dressing.
A composed salad from the era when a molded ring of tomato aspic was standard party fare. The recipe assumes you already know how to make three separate components, none of which it spells out.
- French dressing, 1900s senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. It means a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt, pepper, whisked or shaken to combine.
- Marinating timeThe recipe gives none. Half an hour or so is enough; celery holds its snap well, but if left dressed for a long time it will release water and thin the dressing.
- Tomato jelly means aspicA savory tomato gelatin set in a ring mold: seasoned tomato juice or strained stewed tomatoes with unflavored gelatin, chilled until firm. Period gelatines varied in strength, so it is safer to take the ratio from a current aspic recipe. Unmold onto a platter and heap the celery in the center.
- Curled celeryCut short lengths of stalk, slit each end lengthwise into narrow fingers without cutting through the middle, and drop into ice water for half an hour. The strips curl back on themselves.
- Choose the hearts"Tender stalks" is the whole instruction that matters. Older outer ribs are stringy and fibrous; use the inner hearts, or peel the outer ribs with a vegetable peeler to remove the strings.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made at home with raw yolks. If you make your own rather than using a jar, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this dish is cooked.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three cups of cut celery will serve roughly four to six as a side salad, depending on the size of the aspic ring.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in late nineteenth-century America, sold in tall cut-glass celery vases and set on the table as an ornament as much as a food; a salad built almost entirely of celery hearts was a small display of means. The tomato jelly ring belongs to the same moment: commercial powdered gelatin, which appeared at the start of the 1890s and spread through households nearer the turn of the century, put molded salads within reach of ordinary households, and cookbooks of this generation used a jelly ring the way a later era used a bed of greens, as a frame that held a loose mixture in shape on the platter. Curled celery, shredded lettuce and a spoonful of mayonnaise are the standard garnish vocabulary of the period, familiar enough in books like this one that the recipe assumes no explanation is needed.