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Vegetable Salad
Equal portions of potatoes and beets, one-half the amount of celery or cabbage and a few English walnuts, mixed with a French dressing and served on lettuce, make an appetizing salad. POTATO SALAD No. I Potatoes and celery in the proportion of two parts of potato to one part of celery may be mixed with cream salad dressing.
Two terse formulas run together here, in the manner of a professional cook's notebook: proportions, not procedures. The work is in the details Estes leaves out.
- Dress the potatoes warmWarm boiled potatoes take up dressing far better than cold ones. Peel, dice and toss with the French dressing while still hot, then cool.
- The beets will bleedEqual portions of potato and beet means a pink salad within minutes. Dress the beets separately and fold them in at the last moment if you want the potato to stay white.
- French dressing, 1911Not the sweet orange bottled sauce. It means oil and vinegar in roughly three to one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion just before use.
- Cream salad dressingThe name covered several things in books of this period, often a cooked dressing of egg, vinegar and butter or flour thinned with cream, closer to boiled dressing than to modern mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, or mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream, stands in acceptably.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the American black walnut, which is far stronger. A few means a small handful, chopped; toast them briefly to keep them from going soft in the dressing.
- Celery or cabbageBoth are there for crunch. Use the inner ribs of celery, or shred cabbage fine and salt it briefly, then squeeze dry so it does not water down the dressing.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given at all. Roughly 1 lb potatoes, 1 lb beets, half a pound of celery and a quarter cup of walnuts makes six side servings; the second recipe scales the same way at two parts potato to one celery.
- ServingServed on lettuce means a leaf as the plate, not a tossed base. Whole cup-shaped leaves of butter or iceberg hold a mound of salad neatly.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and went on to cook for the Pullman Palace Car Company and later for the executives of a Chicago steel company — one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef. Composed vegetable salads bound in dressing and set on a lettuce leaf were a fixture of hotel and dining-car service in the period, valued because they could be prepared in quantity ahead of the rush and plated cold to order. The pairing of potato with beet has a long life in Northern and Eastern European cooking as well, where the beet is welcomed precisely for the color that a hotel cook would have been trying to control.