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Waldorf Salaa
Two cups of celery chopped fine, grated cind of one orange, one cup of apples cut in dice. If fine red apples take six and scoop out insides, making little cups for the salads. Mix the above with the following mayonnaise: One very cold egg yolk with one teaspoon of onion juice and yolk of one boiled egg, one cup of cold olive oil, one tablespoon of sugar, one tablespoon of vinegar, one tablespoon of lemon juice, one teaspoon of salt, one-fourth teaspoon of cayenne, one-half teaspoon of mustard. Mix thoroughly by stirring oil, drop by drop, to the egg and a few drops of vinegar, lemon, salt, pepper, etc, which have been previously thoroughly mixed together; then fill the cups or make plain mixture, serving on white lettuce leaves. Cheese balls are delicious served with this salad. -Mrs Howard P. Denison.
A straightforward apple-and-celery salad from the era when Waldorf salad was still new, dressed with a from-scratch mayonnaise. The dressing is where the attention goes.
- The hinge: build the emulsion slowlyThe instruction to add the oil drop by drop is not decoration. One raw yolk will carry a cup of oil, but only if the first two tablespoons go in almost a drop at a time with constant beating; after that you can thin to a slow stream. A blender or immersion blender does the same job in under a minute.
- The cooked yolkThe yolk of a hard-boiled egg turns up in a number of period mayonnaise recipes, adding body and making the emulsion harder to break. Mash it smooth into the seasonings before any oil goes in, or you will get lumps.
- Raw eggThe dressing is never heated. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a good bought mayonnaise thinned with the lemon, vinegar and onion juice.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon is what you want. Do not substitute chopped onion, which will ruin the texture of a smooth dressing.
- Cayenne and mustardA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in this quantity of dressing is assertive by modern standards but not unreasonable. The mustard is almost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, and it also helps stabilise the emulsion.
- ApplesIf you use the six red apples, all six are hollowed as cups and their scooped-out insides supply the diced apple. Choose firm, evenly shaped red apples, hollow them with a melon baller, and rub the cut surfaces with lemon juice or they will brown before they reach the table.
- No walnutsThere are none here, and none in the earliest versions of the salad. The orange zest does the aromatic work instead. Add nuts if you like, but the recipe as written is not missing anything.
- Cheese ballsThe recipe leaves these undefined; small balls of soft cheese, set on the plate beside the salad, are the likeliest reading.
- YieldSix filled apple cups, or four to six servings as a plain mixture on lettuce. The mayonnaise makes rather more than the salad needs; keep the remainder refrigerated and use it within a couple of days, bearing in mind it contains raw yolk.
Waldorf salad is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s, where it is credited to the maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky, and in its first printed forms it was nothing more than apple, celery and mayonnaise — the walnuts that now define it were a later addition. This version, contributed by Mrs Howard P. Denison, catches the dish at that early stage, with grated orange rind standing in as the flourish and the apples themselves hollowed into cups. The long mayonnaise instructions are the real period marker: bottled mayonnaise was not yet a pantry staple in American homes, so a cookbook printing a salad generally had to teach the dressing along with it.