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Cucumber Salad
I red sweet pepper 1 teaspoonful onion juice Salt and pepper 1 tablespoonful lemon juice Oil and vinegar Arrange the crisp lettuce leaves on an oval earthenware dish and put the potatoes in the center. Chopped parsley and thin slices of cold hard cooked eggs may be added to this salad as a garnish, or sliced gherkins and capers may be used.
The page has clearly lost part of its type: the heading says cucumber, the ingredient list is a truncated column of seasonings, and the method dresses potatoes. Treat it as an assembly formula for a cold vegetable salad rather than a fixed set of quantities.
- The missing ingredientsThe ingredient list has been run together and cropped, so the cucumbers (or potatoes), lettuce and dressing amounts are gone. Nothing survives to tell us the original amounts; if you want a working figure, roughly 2 cucumbers or 3 cups diced cooked potato makes a salad for four, with the pepper, onion juice and lemon juice as given.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning made by halving an onion and pressing it against a coarse grater or a reamer, catching the liquid. A teaspoonful is a small quantity, well within what one onion yields; a light grating of onion on a microplane gives the same effect without the pulp.
- Oil and vinegarThe book leaves the dressing to the reader, assuming a plain French dressing of oil and vinegar, salted and shaken or whisked to a temporary emulsion; period books give the ratio variously, commonly between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar. The tablespoonful of lemon juice is listed separately, so it reads as additional acid rather than a replacement for the vinegar.
- Red sweet pepperCut in fine dice or thin rings. In this period a red sweet pepper often meant a canned pimiento, drained and blotted, rather than a fresh bell pepper; either works, but a canned pimiento is softer and bleeds colour into the dressing.
- If you are using cucumbersSalt sliced cucumber for twenty minutes and drain before dressing, or the water it gives up will thin the vinaigrette on the plate. Dress at the last moment; lettuce laid under a wet salad collapses within a few minutes.
- The earthenware dishThis is a serving instruction, not a cooking one. Nothing in the recipe goes near heat; the oval earthenware dish is simply the platter the salad is composed on.
- GarnishesHard-cooked eggs should be sliced with a wet knife and laid on only when the salad is composed. Gherkins and capers both carry their own vinegar, so cut the vinegar in the dressing slightly if you use them.
A salad chapter of this kind is really a chapter about the serving dish: nothing here is cooked, and the detail that carries the most weight is the oval earthenware platter. The dressing itself is the standard American reading of French dressing as taught in the cooking-school tradition of the period, oil to acid in proportions that varied from cook to cook, with onion juice, lemon and a chopped sweet pepper standing in for the herbs an earlier French cook would have used. Onion juice in particular is a fingerprint of that era's household writing, prized because it seasoned without leaving visible pieces in a dish meant to look tidy on the table.