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Delicious Shrimp Salad
1 small bunch celery 1 sweet green pepper Rowena M. Nutt. 3 hard boiled eggs 6 small pickles Paprika Clean and flake the shrimp. Cut celery and pickles into small pieces and the eggs into halves lengthwise and then crosswise in small pieces. Mix all together and chill.
Make a dressing of the following: 1/2 Cof water 2 T butter 1/4 C vinegar 1/4 C sugar 2 eggs 1 t mustard 1 t flour Boil together the water, butter, vinegar and sugar. While this is cooking beat the eggs well and add to them the mustard and flour. Stir into the eggs the first mixture, beating well. Put over the fire again and stir until thick. Chill and when ready to serve mix with the shrimp and arrange in a nest of lettuce leaves. Sprinkle lightly with paprika and garnish with narrow strips of the green pepper.
A cooked boiled dressing bound with egg, folded into shrimp and celery — the standard church-supper salad of its day. The dressing is the part that needs attention.
- Shrimp quantityThe ingredient list gives no amount. For one small bunch of celery, three eggs and six pickles, figure about 1 to 1 1/2 lb of cooked shrimp (roughly 2 to 3 cups flaked), which serves six as a lunch salad.
- "Flake the shrimp"The instruction suggests shrimp broken up rather than left whole; canned shrimp was widely available at the time and freshly boiled shrimp would serve as well. Small cooked shrimp, halved lengthwise, give the same texture; peel, devein and pull the tails.
- The dressing measurements"14 C vinegar" and "14 C sugar" are quarter-cups. A quarter cup each of vinegar and sugar to half a cup of water gives a sharp-sweet boiled dressing in the old style; taste and cut the sugar if it reads as too candied.
- TemperingThe direction to "stir into the eggs the first mixture" is the hinge. Pour the hot vinegar mixture into the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking, then return the lot to the pan. Reversing the order scrambles the eggs.
- Cooking the dressingUse a heavy pan over low heat, or a bowl over simmering water, and stir constantly until it coats a spoon — a few minutes. It must not boil. Strain it if any curd forms.
- Pickles"small pickles" most likely means small whole cucumber pickles, sweet or sour, rather than cut spears. Six small ones is roughly 1/2 cup chopped; drain them well or the salad weeps.
- AssemblyDress the salad only at serving. Held dressed, the celery softens and the boiled dressing thins as salt draws water from the vegetables.
Boiled dressing of this kind — vinegar, sugar, butter and egg thickened over the fire, with mustard and a little flour for insurance — predates the commercial mayonnaise that displaced it, and it persisted in community cookbooks long after jarred dressing was on every shelf. It keeps better than mayonnaise, costs less, and its sweet-sour edge suits celery and pickle. Shrimp appearing in a contributed community-cookbook salad reflects the reach of the canning industry, which by the early twentieth century put canned shrimp within reach of inland kitchens.