Rice Salad
To 2 cupfuls of cold boiled rice take 1 cupful of finely diced deep red beets and 1 cupful of chopped or cut celery. Do not mix together until just before serving, then combine with a French dressing and serve in cups made of lettuce leaves.
A thrift-era salad built on leftovers, and the instruction not to combine until serving is the whole point.
- Why the late mixing mattersBeet juice bleeds into rice within minutes and turns the whole bowl a uniform pink. Toss rice, beets and celery with the dressing at the table if you want the three colours to read separately.
- The riceCold boiled long-grain rice, cooked dry and separate, works best; short-grain and risotto rices clump and go pasty under dressing. Two cupfuls cooked is roughly two-thirds of a cup raw.
- BeetsThe recipe assumes beets already cooked, as period salad recipes generally do; "deep red" describes the colour of the beet rather than its cooked state. Canned or vacuum-packed beets are fine here, drained and patted dry; blot them well or they will dye the rice even in the moment it takes to serve.
- French dressing in 1900French dressing here -- A simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Quantity of dressingNone is given. Start with about a third of a cup for this volume; cold rice absorbs dressing greedily, so season and taste after mixing rather than before.
- Lettuce cupsThe outer leaves of iceberg or butter lettuce hold their shape best. Chill them in cold water and dry thoroughly, or the dressing slides straight off.
- YieldAbout four servings as a side salad, or two as a light lunch.
Cold rice salads of this kind belong to the tradition of economy cookery that treated leftover starch as the base of a dish rather than something to be discarded. Rice was cheap, shipped well and kept, and a cupful left from the previous day's dinner could be turned into something that looked deliberate once beets and celery were added for colour and crunch. The lettuce cup is often said to have been a common presentation in American household manuals, a way to make a modest mixture look composed without a mould or a garnish that cost anything. "French dressing" in these books almost always means plain vinaigrette; the emulsified, sweetened commercial product that later took the name is a twentieth-century development.