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White Grape Salad
One pound of white grapes, one head of lettuce, one pint of chopped celery, mayonnaise dressing. Cut grapes in two, taking out seeds, or skin grapes if you desire. For mayonnaise take yolks of two eggs, beat three minutes with Dover egg beater. Add oil gradually, about a cup. When thick add one teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of sugar, the juice of half a lemon, or a tablespoon of vinegar, and a dash of red pepper.
Keep all ingredients perfectly cold.
When ready to serve, mix mayonnaise dressing, celery and grapes, and send to the table on lettuce leaves. -Mrs Joshua L. Miner, Wilkesbarre.
A turn-of-the-century fruit-and-celery salad bound with a raw-yolk mayonnaise. The salad itself is straightforward; the dressing as written is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe mayonnaise is built on two raw egg yolks that are never heated at any stage, and the finished salad is served cold. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that was not understood when this was written, and the acid here (half a lemon or a tablespoon of vinegar against a cup of oil and two yolks) is far too little to be relied on for safety. For the dressing, use a current mayonnaise recipe and leave it there.
- "White grapes"Period usage for green grapes — Malaga or similar table varieties, which were seeded. Modern seedless green grapes need only halving, and the halving still matters: whole grapes shed dressing and roll off the leaf.
- Dover egg beaterThe standard American hand-cranked rotary beater of the period; the recipe gives a beating time rather than a count of strokes.
- A pint of chopped celeryMeasured by volume after chopping, so roughly 2 cups — about four or five ribs from an inner heart. Use the tender pale ribs; outer stalks are too stringy at this cut size.
- "Keep all ingredients perfectly cold"This was emulsion advice, not food-safety advice. Cold oil and cold bowl were thought to help the sauce hold, and cold celery and grapes keep the salad crisp.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chile. A dash means well under an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Yield and serviceA pound of grapes with two cups of celery serves six as a side salad. The lettuce leaves are the plate, not a tossed base — one cupped leaf per person, filled at the last moment so it does not wilt.
Salads of fruit and celery dressed with mayonnaise were a fashion of the 1890s and 1900s in American middle-class cooking, the same impulse that produced the apple-and-celery Waldorf salad; celery supplied the crunch and the faint bitterness that kept the sweetness in check, and it was a prestige vegetable at the time, sold blanched and pale and often set out in a special tall glass. That white grapes could be called for at all reflects the refrigerated rail car and the Californian and imported Malaga grape trade, which put table grapes into eastern markets well outside the local season. The attribution to Mrs Joshua L. Miner of Wilkes-Barre is typical of the way contributed collections of this period were assembled: household recipes printed under the contributor's married name and town, with measurements as loose as the cook's own habit.