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Raw Carrot Salad
Mrs. Geo. Smith. 2 C ground carrots 1 C diced apples ½ C diced celery ¼ C chopped nut meats Serve with the following Mayonnaise dressing: 9 T sugar ¾ C vinegar 2 t mustard 1/2 C water 2 t salt 4 egg yolks or 2 whole eggs 1 T flour Cook until thick. This makes about one pint.
Mrs. E. J. Brixen.
A grated-carrot salad with a cooked, boiled-style dressing of the sort that stood in for jarred mayonnaise in church cookbooks. The dressing, not the salad, is where the attention goes.
- The hinge: temper the eggsWhisk the yolks with the flour, sugar and a little of the cold water first, then add the hot vinegar mixture in a thin stream before returning it all to the pan. Dumping yolks into hot vinegar gives you sweet-sour scrambled egg.
- Cook it gentlyHold the dressing over low heat or a water bath and stir constantly until it coats a spoon, roughly 175-180F. It will thicken further as it chills, so pull it a shade thinner than you want it.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. "Ground carrots" means put through a food grinder; the coarse side of a box grater or a food processor pulsed short gives the same shreddy texture.
- Fractions to read with careThe celery and nut quantities as printed are out of proportion to 2 cups of carrot; a half cup of diced celery and a quarter cup of nuts fit the salad. The vinegar is three-quarters of a cup. The sugar figure is not reliable as written -- start with 2 to 3 tablespoons and taste, since three-quarters cup of vinegar wants sweetening but not candying.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar was commonly used in dressings of this kind. If distilled vinegar tastes harsh here, cut it with a little more water or use cider vinegar instead.
- ApplesDice them last and toss with a squeeze of lemon, or they brown before the dressing goes on. A firm tart apple holds its shape against the dressing better than a soft eating apple.
- YieldThe dressing makes about a pint, far more than this salad needs. Refrigerated, it will keep several days and suits cabbage slaw or potato salad. The salad itself serves four to six as a side.
Raw grated carrot became common on American tables in the 1920s and 1930s, when publicized vitamin research turned uncooked vegetables from an oddity into a virtue and the domestic-science press pushed "raw vegetable salads." The pairing with apple, celery and nuts echoes the frame of a Waldorf salad, which was already well known by then. Just as telling is the dressing: a cooked, flour-thickened, vinegar-based "mayonnaise" that is not mayonnaise at all in the emulsified French sense. Boiled dressings of this kind were common in home kitchens -- cheap, keeping for days without separating, and not demanding the patient oil-drizzling of true mayonnaise.