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Beet Salad
1 C cold boiled beets cut in small cubes 1 hard boiled egg diced 1/3 C diced cucumber 1/2 C salad dressing Salt 1/3 C cold boiled potatoes cubed 1/3 C diced celery Mix the beets, potatoes, celery, egg, cucumber and salt very lightly together with a fork. Add salad dressing. Serve in a bowl with nasturtium leaves and flowers for garnishment.
A cold composed salad of the church-supper type, bound with dressing rather than pickled, despite its place in the Pickles-Relishes chapter. Two of the printed measurements need judgment before you start.
- The "12 C salad dressing"This is a typesetting error; twelve cups of dressing for roughly three cups of vegetables is impossible. Read it as 1/2 cup, which is about right for lightly coating this quantity, and add it in two stages so you can stop when the mixture is just moistened.
- What "salad dressing" meantIn American community cookbooks of this general vintage the phrase usually meant a boiled or cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar, rather than an oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, though the recipe does not say. Commercial mayonnaise or a jarred sandwich spread of the Miracle Whip type is the nearest supermarket substitute; a mustardy boiled dressing is closer.
- ProportionsThe celery at 1 1/2 cups outweighs the beets at 1 cup, so this reads as a celery salad tinted pink rather than a beet salad. If you want the beets to lead, cut the celery back to a cup.
- Cook and chill the vegetables separatelyBeets bleed. Boil beets and potatoes apart, cool both completely, and dress the salad no more than an hour before serving or everything turns a uniform magenta.
- Beet cookingWhole unpeeled beets with an inch of stem left on hold their color; 35-50 minutes simmering depending on size, then slip the skins off under cold water. Vacuum-packed cooked beets work if you rinse and drain them well.
- Fold, don't stirThe instruction to mix "very lightly together with a fork" is the hinge. Boiled potato cubes break down into paste under a spoon, and the salad becomes a pink mash.
- Nasturtium garnishBoth the leaves and flowers are edible and peppery, though the recipe calls for them only as garnishment. Use blooms from plants not treated with pesticide, and if you have no nasturtiums, watercress gives a similar bite.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 cups dressed, serving four as a side salad.
Community cookbooks of this kind were assembled from members' own recipe cards and sold to raise money, which is why the measurements are terse and the proofreading uneven. Salads of cubed cooked root vegetables bound in boiled dressing were common at American church suppers and ladies' luncheons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, belonging to the older tradition of composed, dressed salads — salmagundi, salade russe — rather than the leafy salad now assumed by the word. Nasturtiums were a standard kitchen-garden annual, cheap, prolific, and edible, and household writers of the period recommended their flowers as a decorative-but-usable garnish. The placement among pickles and relishes suggests the compilers thought of it less as a course than as something set on the table alongside the meat.