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Onion Salad
Peel and cut in slices two large full green onions.
Throw them in cold water twenty minutes. Peel and cut in slices two cucumbers, throw into the same water, drain and dry on a soft towel. Arrange them neatly, slices of cucumber, and onion overlapping. Pour over French dressing and serve.
A two-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the water soak and on what you mean by French dressing. Both need a word of explanation.
- The cold-water soak is the hingeTwenty minutes in cold water draws out the harsh sulphur compounds that make raw onion linger on the palate, leaving the sweetness. Do not shorten it, and use genuinely cold water; a few ice cubes help.
- "Two large full green onions"This is ambiguous. It most likely means mature onions lifted while the tops are still green, not the slim scallions sold today as green onions. Two medium sweet onions, sliced thin, give the intended result; if you use scallions you can skip most of the soaking.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn a book of this period French dressing is plain oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion; printed ratios of the day run anywhere from two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet, orange, tomato-based bottled dressing that later took the name in America.
- Dry the slices properlyThe instruction to dry on a soft towel is not fussiness. Oil will not cling to wet vegetables, and the residual water thins the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the dish.
- Cucumbers have changedOlder cucumber varieties tended to have tough, bitter skins and well-developed seeds, hence the peeling. English or Persian cucumbers need no peeling and no seeding; a mandoline slice keeps them even.
- Dress at the tableSalt in the dressing pulls water out of cucumber within minutes. Arrange the overlapping slices ahead, keep them cold, and pour the dressing just before serving.
- YieldTwo cucumbers and two onions will stretch to about four side servings alongside cold meat or a summer supper, though the recipe gives no yield.
Sliced cucumber dressed with oil and vinegar is one of the oldest salads in the European kitchen, and the addition of raw onion is the standard cottage-garden variation: two things ready at the same moment in high summer, needing no cooking in a hot kitchen. The soaking of onion slices in cold water was a common instruction in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a period when raw onion was widely thought coarse and indigestible, and mellowing it was the price of admission to the salad bowl. "French dressing" in such books simply distinguished the plain oil-and-vinegar mixture from boiled or mayonnaise dressings; the sweetened bottled product that later claimed the name belongs to a much later chapter of American food.