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Salade à la Waldorf
Ingredients.
Two small Turnips, cooked.
Two Potatoes, cooked.
Three Artichokes, cooked.
One slice of Pineapple.
An ingredient list rather than a full method — the book assumes a cook who knows that a salad of this kind is diced, bound with mayonnaise and turned out neatly. A few things need pinning down before you can work from it.
- There is no dressing listedA Waldorf of this period is bound with mayonnaise, and without it you have a bowl of cold diced vegetables. Allow roughly 4-5 tablespoons of mayonnaise, thinned with a little lemon juice or the pineapple syrup, for this quantity.
- Which artichokeAn unqualified "artichoke" in a book of this kind more often means the globe, with "cooked" implying the bottoms, trimmed and boiled until tender; Jerusalem artichokes would also suit the dish. The original does not say, so choose and be consistent.
- Cut and textureEverything should be cut to the same small dice, about 1 cm, so no one element dominates. Cook the turnips and potatoes until just tender and no further — waxy potatoes hold their shape where floury ones collapse into the dressing.
- The pineappleA "slice" most likely means a round rather than a wedge, though the original does not specify. Tinned pineapple was widely available and works perfectly well; drain it thoroughly or the salad will weep.
- Season and acidulateBoiled turnip and potato are flat on their own. Salt, white pepper and a squeeze of lemon before the mayonnaise goes in makes the difference between this and a plate of leftovers.
- Chill and serveDress while the vegetables are cold, then rest the salad 30 minutes so the flavours settle. Serve in a lettuce-lined bowl or moulded in a cup and turned out. As written it makes a side salad for four.
The Waldorf salad is generally traced to Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s, and the version credited to him is starkly simple: apple and celery cut fine and bound with mayonnaise, with walnuts appearing in later renderings rather than the first. What this book prints under the name is something else entirely — root vegetables, artichokes and a slice of pineapple.