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Japanese Salad
Wash even-sized beets and cook them in boiling salted water until tender-an hour or longer. Plunge them into cold water and rub off the skin. With a sharp knife and a spoon remove the center from each beet, leaving a cup. Let them stand in weak vinegar on ice. Cut into dice enough cold boiled potato to make two cups, add one cup of diced celery, one tablespoon of chopped parsley, a few drops of onion juice and one tablespoon of pecan nut meats. all lightly with a fork, marinate with French dressing made with one-half teaspoon of salt, one-fourth teaspoon of paprika, three tablespoons of olive oil and one tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice. When ready to serve, arrange nests of lettuce leaves on a platter, dry the beet cups, fill them with the salad and place a beet in each nest of leaves, Mix putting a teaspoon of mayonnaise on top of each cup just before serving.
Mayonnaise: Mix together one teaspoon each of dry mustard, powdered sugar and salt, and a little cayenne. Add the yolks of two eggs, beating well with a wooden spoon. Add gradually, a few drops at a time, one pint of olive oil; thin with two tablespoons of lemon juice added alternately, a little at a time, with the oil. Last of all, add two tablespoons of vinegar gradually. This dressing should be mixed in a saucepan set in ice water. Annabel Lee.
A composed salad of the period: hollowed beets used as edible cups, filled with a potato-celery salad and crowned with mayonnaise. The text has garbled typesetting — the stray "Mix" belongs with "all lightly with a fork" earlier in the paragraph.
- Hollowing the beetsCook the beets whole and unpeeled with an inch of root and stem left on, or they bleed out and go pale. Once skinned, a melon baller works better than a spoon for scooping the centers; leave a wall about a quarter inch thick or the cups collapse when filled.
- An hour or longerThat timing assumes large winter beets. Medium beets of 2 to 3 inches take 35 to 45 minutes at a simmer; test with a skewer rather than the clock, since a beet cooked to mush cannot be carved into a cup.
- "Weak vinegar"Roughly one part vinegar to three parts water, enough to season and firm the beet cups without pickling them. The acid may also help limit bleeding, though the recipe's own safeguard is to dry the cups well before filling.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. It gives onion flavor without visible pieces, which mattered in an era that prized a smooth-looking salad. A few drops means a few drops.
- One tablespoon of pecansAlmost certainly a tablespoon of chopped nuts, and light for three cups of salad. Two to three tablespoons, coarsely chopped and stirred in at the last moment, keeps them from softening in the dressing.
- The mayonnaise proportionsOne pint of oil to two yolks is a full two cups — a standard rich ratio, but it will break if the oil goes in faster than a thread at the start. The saucepan set in ice water is the period's insurance against separation; a cold bowl and a whisk do the same work, and a blender or food processor does it faster.
- Raw yolksThis mayonnaise is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs, keep the finished dressing refrigerated, and use it within a few days; the acid alone does not make it shelf-stable.
- YieldThe filling makes about three cups, enough for six to eight beet cups depending on size. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and hold cold, or the beets weep into the potato.
The name is a piece of turn-of-the-century Japonisme rather than any connection to Japanese cooking — American and English cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s attached "Japanese" to salads, teas and table settings as a mark of the fashionable and the artfully arranged, in the wake of the great expositions that brought Japanese design to Western audiences. A separate and better-documented "salade japonaise" belongs to Alexandre Dumas fils, whose 1887 play Francillon described a warm potato salad with mussels and white wine, the wine named being Chateau d'Yquem; the name spread through restaurant menus, and cooks on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have applied it loosely to other potato salads thereafter. What survives here is the potato base and the ambition to make it look like something else. The beet cup is pure luncheon-page confection of the era, when contributors \ this one signing herself Annabel Lee \\ competed to turn plain cold vegetables into architecture fit for a luncheon platter.