Celery Salad
Wash, scrape, and cut in small pieces, one bunch of celery, using the top leaves and upper part of stalks for garnishing. Cut the stalks in two-inch pieces and curl both ends. Mix the celery with mayonnaise dressing; let it stand in the ice chest one half hour. Garnish with mayonnaise, curled celery, and celery leaves.
Cabbage Salad No. I Mix one cup and a half of cabbage and one cup and a half of celery; add one tablespoon chopped onion, one teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, and one cup boiled dressing. Chill and serve. Cabbage Salad No. 2 Remove the center from a heavy white cabbage, leaving a shell. Shred center and mix with cream dressing or mayonnaise. Chill, fill cabbage shell, arrange on a thick bed of parsley, and garnish top of shell with a border of parsley.
Three related celery-and-cabbage salads from the era when celery was a prestige vegetable served in its own cut-glass vase. The technique that carries all three is the curled celery garnish.
- Curling the stalksCut the trimmed stalks into two-inch lengths, then slash each end lengthwise several times with a paring knife, stopping halfway. Drop the pieces into ice water for 20-30 minutes and the fringed ends fan out on their own.
- One bunch of celeryA modern head weighs about 1 to 1 1/4 lb and yields roughly 3 to 4 cups sliced, enough for about four small salad servings. Celery of this period was often blanched and paler, so taste before dressing; today's green stalks are stronger and stringier and the outer ribs are worth peeling.
- Ice chestThe refrigerator. Half an hour is enough to chill and to let the celery soften slightly in the dressing; much longer and it begins to weep and thin the mayonnaise.
- Boiled dressingCalled for in Cabbage Salad No. 1, this is the older cooked dressing of egg, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, sugar and milk or butter, thickened in a double boiler. It is sharp and nearly oil-free rather than rich. A thinned mayonnaise with an extra splash of cider vinegar and a pinch of sugar is the nearest quick substitute, though it is not the same thing.
- Cream dressingThe term generally means a dressing built on cream, vinegar and seasoning rather than a mayonnaise emulsion. Whipped cream folded with lemon juice and salt, or mayonnaise loosened with a little heavy cream, both read correctly.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggPeriod mayonnaise was made fresh from raw yolks. If you make it fresh, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this salad is cooked and it sits at temperature while it is garnished and served.
- The cabbage shellFor No. 2, choose a dense flat-topped white cabbage and cut the cavity with a grapefruit knife, leaving the wall about an inch thick so it holds its shape. Slice a thin sliver off the base so it sits level, and drain the hollowed shell upside down before filling.
- YieldEach of the three makes about four modest servings.
Celery earned its place in American cookbooks of this period because it was expensive and conspicuous: grown in trenches and banked with soil to blanch the stalks pale and tender, it was a market-garden specialty around Kalamazoo, Michigan and other muck-soil districts, and a celery vase stood on formal tables the way a bread basket does now. That status explains the fussy garnishing here, which is really the point of the recipe. Curled celery, scored radishes and parsley beds belonged to the same decorative school that filled turn-of-the-century salad chapters, taught in cooking schools such as the Boston Cooking School, where Fannie Farmer served as principal before founding a school of her own. Worcestershire sauce in the cabbage salad marks the other current of the era: bottled commercial seasonings had become respectable in domestic cooking, and a teaspoon of it did the work a modern cook might ask of mustard or celery seed.