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Garcia Salad
Cut celery, apples and fresh tomatoes in thin strips about two inches long, serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing.
A slice of truffle on the top adds to the appearance and flavor.
A three-ingredient julienne salad from the era when "French dressing" meant oil and vinegar and nothing else. The recipe gives no quantities, so the proportions are yours to set.
- ProportionsEqual volumes of celery, apple and tomato works, but the tomato collapses fastest; cutting it slightly thicker than the other two keeps the strips intact. Figure roughly one rib of celery, half an apple and half a medium tomato per serving.
- French dressing, 1900 senseAt this date the name normally meant a simple vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken just before use. It is not the sweet, tomato-tinted bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Cutting the tomatoUse firm, slightly underripe fruit and cut it into strips through the flesh, discarding the seed jelly. Ripe summer tomatoes shed liquid that thins the dressing and wilts the lettuce.
- Keeping the apple paleThe apple browns within minutes once cut. Toss the strips in a little of the dressing's vinegar or lemon juice, or cut them last and dress immediately.
- CeleryTake the inner ribs and peel the strings from the outer edge of any tough ones. Two-inch strips cut with the grain stay crisp; a soak in ice water for ten minutes firms them further.
- The truffleA fresh black truffle is an expensive garnish for a salad of this kind. A preserved or canned truffle, sliced thin, gives the intended look and aroma; a few drops of truffle oil over the dressing is the practical substitute.
- Assembly and yieldDress the julienne in a bowl, then pile it on whole lettuce leaves so the leaves stay dry and act as a cup. As written the recipe scales freely; serve it as a first course or alongside cold poultry.
Salads named for a person, a hotel or a restaurant were a fashion in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, and the name is often thought to have recorded who sent the recipe in or where the compiler first ate it rather than describing the dish. One suggestive detail is the truffle used purely as a finishing slice on a raw vegetable salad, a habit borrowed from French restaurant practice, where a black truffle cut into rounds and laid on top signalled that a plain dish was meant to be taken seriously. The combination of celery with apple was already well established in American household cooking, since both kept well through the winter; adding fresh tomato marks the salad as a warm-weather dish.