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Vegetable Salad (Put through a coarse grinder)
Put through a coarse grinder an equal amount of carrots, green pepper, celery. Mix thoroughly with mayonnaise and serve on lettuce or in tomatoes (shells).
Louise Wehrenberg. 8 C chopped cabbage 1/2 C sweet relish
A three-ingredient ground-vegetable salad of the church-supper era, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already owned a food grinder. The proportions are given by eye, and the last line appears to be stray type from a neighboring recipe.
- The stray last line"8 C chopped cabbage 1/2 C sweet relish" does not belong to these instructions, which call only for carrots, green pepper and celery. It looks like the beginning of an adjacent recipe that has run together with this one on the page. Ignore it.
- "A coarse grinder"This means a hand-cranked meat grinder clamped to the table, fitted with the widest plate. A food processor pulsed four or five times gets close, but it bruises and weeps more than a grinder does. The large holes of a box grater, or a knife and a few minutes, give a drier, better-textured result.
- Drain before dressingGround carrot, pepper and celery release a surprising amount of liquid within ten minutes. Let the mixture sit in a sieve, press gently, then fold in the mayonnaise, or the salad will separate into a pink puddle on the plate.
- Equal amounts of whatEqual amounts by volume after grinding is the sensible reading. One cup each of carrot, green pepper and celery yields roughly three cups of salad, enough for six tomato shells or six lettuce cups.
- MayonnaiseIn a community cookbook of this period this means commercial jarred mayonnaise or a boiled dressing, not aioli. Start with about half a cup for three cups of vegetables and add more only if it looks dry; ground vegetables need less binder than diced ones.
- Tomato shellsHalve or top firm tomatoes, scoop the seeds and pulp, salt the insides and invert them on a rack for fifteen minutes to drain. Undrained shells flood the salad.
- SeasoningThe recipe specifies none. Salt is needed, and a little lemon juice or cider vinegar lifts the whole thing considerably.
- Make it close to servingGround celery goes limp and green pepper turns assertive after a few hours in dressing. Grind and chill the vegetables ahead if you like, but combine within an hour of the table.
Community cookbooks like this one are full of recipes that assume a hand-cranked grinder as a matter of course; the same tool ground the leftover roast for hash, the pickles for relish, and the raw vegetables for salads like this one. Ground-vegetable salads bound with mayonnaise belong to the long American vogue for the "salad course," often traced to the turn of the century and said to have persisted well past mid-century, when a salad was more often something constructed and dressed than something tossed. Serving it in a hollowed tomato or a lettuce cup was a common presentation of the period, generally associated with tearoom and luncheon menus. The attribution to a named parishioner is the usual convention of these books, where the contributor's name was both a credit and a small guarantee of quality among neighbors who knew her cooking.