Waldorf Salad
This salad consists of equal portions of finely cut tart apples, celery and English walnuts. Marinate with French dressing for several hours. Drain, and serve with mayonnaise on lettuce or in apple cups.
A three-line formula that assumes you already know how to make French dressing and mayonnaise. The proportions are by volume, not weight.
- Equal portions means cupsEqual portions -- The recipe does not say by what measure. It reads most naturally as equal volumes of diced apple, celery and walnuts; measured by weight the walnuts would take up far more of the bowl than the other two.
- French dressing, 1911Not the sweet orange bottled dressing. It means a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine.
- Cut the marinating timeSeveral hours in acid turns the apple mealy and the celery limp. Thirty minutes is enough to season everything and keep the apples from browning; drain well before dressing or the mayonnaise will slacken.
- Choose a firm tart appleGranny Smith, Braeburn or a good russet. Soft eating apples collapse under the dressing. Leave the skin on for colour.
- Toast the walnutsFive to seven minutes in a 350F oven, cooled before adding. Raw walnuts left in a wet salad go soft and taste faintly bitter.
- Apple cupsLarge apples with the tops cut off and the flesh scooped out, the shells rubbed with lemon so they do not brown. A serving conceit of the period; lettuce leaves do the same job with less waste.
- MayonnaiseIf you make it from scratch it contains raw yolk. Use pasteurised eggs, or a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream, if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
The salad is generally traced to Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf in New York, and to the hotel's dining room in the mid-1890s. The earliest published versions are just apple and celery bound with mayonnaise; the walnuts that everyone now considers essential were a later addition, and this version — attributed to Rufus Estes, a Pullman dining-car chef whose Good Things to Eat (1911) is among the earlier cookbooks published by an African American author, though it follows Malinda Russell (1866) and Abby Fisher (1881) — is one of the earlier printed versions to include them. It also adds a step absent from the hotel version, marinating the cut fruit in vinaigrette before the mayonnaise goes on, which seasons the salad through rather than only coating it. That a hotel dish reached print in a railway cook's collection within about fifteen years suggests how quickly fashionable American restaurant food travelled at the turn of the century.