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Celery Salad
Cut the white stalks of celery into half inch pieces. To each pint of this allow a little over a gill of Mayonnaise. Dust the celery lightly with salt and pepper, mix with the dressing, heap on a cold dish. Garnish with the white tops of the celery and serve immediately. This salad is decidedly better mixed at the table.
A three-line salad whose whole point is texture: crisp celery, just enough mayonnaise to coat, and no standing time. The measurements are volume-based and easy to translate.
- A gillA gill is half a cup. "A little over a gill" to each pint of cut celery works out to roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of mayonnaise per 2 cups of celery — enough to coat, not to pool.
- Measure the celery cut, not wholeThe pint refers to the half-inch pieces after cutting. Two cups of cut celery is about four to five inner stalks from a medium head.
- "White stalks" means the heartNineteenth-century celery was banked with soil or boards to blanch it pale and mild. Modern Pascal celery is green and stronger; use the inner heart, which is still pale, tender and comparatively sweet, and save the dark outer ribs for stock.
- The garnishThe "white tops" are most likely the pale yellow inner leaves at the crown of the heart rather than the tough leafy tops of outer ribs, though the recipe does not specify. Leave a few clusters whole when you trim.
- Season with restraintCommercial mayonnaise is already salted and acidic. Dust the celery very lightly and taste after mixing rather than before.
- Mix at the table, and mean itThis is the hinge of the recipe. Salt and dressing draw water out of celery within minutes, thinning the mayonnaise and slackening the crunch. Keep the cut celery cold and covered, and combine immediately before serving.
- If you make the mayonnaiseA period mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil and vinegar, never heated. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the finished salad refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- YieldA pint of celery with its dressing serves three to four as a side salad. It does not keep; make only what will be eaten.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in Britain and America through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why so many household books of the period treat it as something to be shown off rather than cooked down. Producing pale, tender stalks meant blanching — earthing up the trenches or boarding the rows to keep light off the ribs — and the labor involved put good celery on the same footing as hothouse fruit. Households owned celery vases and celery glasses expressly so the trimmed hearts could stand upright on the table, and the muck-land districts of Michigan and New York built a reputation on shipping them. A salad that asks only for the white stalks, a spoonful of mayonnaise, and immediate service belongs to that moment: the vegetable was considered good enough that the cook's job was mainly to stay out of its way.