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American Salad
3 hard cooked eggs 1 cupful chopped celery I lettuce 1/2 cupful sliced radishes 1 cupful diced cucumbers 1 teaspoonful made mustard 1 teaspoonful grated horseradish Salt and black pepper Oil Vinegar Peel two of the cucumbers and cut them in two lengthways. Then scrape out all the seeds. Put the pieces of cucumber into ice water containing the lemon juice.
Chop the third cucumber with the red pepper, and season this mixture with the salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, and onion juice.
Set the cucumbers on ice to get very cold. Cut each half in two lengthways in serving.
This salad looks dainty on small earthenware dishes.
The ingredient list and the method on this page do not describe the same salad, which is worth sorting out before you start. What follows covers both the mismatch and the archaic details.
- The list and the method disagreeThe ingredients call for hard-cooked eggs, celery, lettuce, radishes, diced cucumber, mustard and horseradish; the method uses three cucumbers, a red pepper, lemon juice and onion juice and mentions none of the rest. This is almost certainly two recipes collided in typesetting. Decide which salad you are making before you shop.
- If you follow the methodYou need three cucumbers, a red pepper, lemon juice, onion juice, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Two cucumbers are peeled, halved and seeded, then chilled in the acidulated ice water; the third is chopped with the pepper and dressed. The text never actually says to combine the two, so filling the shells with the chopped mixture is an inference, and no yield is given.
- If you follow the ingredient listTreat it as a chopped salad: quartered hard-cooked eggs, celery, radishes and diced cucumber on lettuce, dressed with oil and vinegar sharpened with a teaspoon each of prepared mustard and grated horseradish.
- "Made mustard"Prepared mustard from a jar, not dry mustard powder. A smooth Dijon or a plain yellow both work; if you only have powder, use about a third of the amount and slake it in a little cold water first.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning that gives onion flavour without texture. Grate half an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon is plenty for this quantity.
- Grated horseradishAt the time this meant the fresh root. Bottled horseradish is packed in vinegar and is milder; use half again as much and cut back the vinegar in the dressing to compensate.
- The ice water soakNot decoration. Half an hour in acidulated ice water firms the cucumber shells and keeps them crisp under a wet dressing. Drain and pat them dry or the dressing will slide off.
- Seeding and saltingScraping out the seeds removes most of the water. If your cucumbers are large and watery, salt the hollowed halves lightly and drain them cut-side down for twenty minutes before the ice bath.
This appears to come from a book concerned with the casserole in its original sense — the earthenware or enamelled vessel itself, not the baked dish Americans later named after it — and the closing line about "small earthenware dishes" may suggest that salad has been included with the same pottery in view. "American salad" was a loose label in turn-of-the-century cookery writing, often said to denote a raw, crisp, oil-and-vinegar assembly as against other salad styles then current. The cucumber shell filled with its own chopped flesh is often described as a dining-room presentation of the period, when salads were judged first on whether they looked "dainty" on the plate. The garbled state of the text here is not unusual: cookbooks of this era are traditionally said to have been compiled from varied sources, and lists frequently drifted away from the methods they were meant to serve.