Cherry Salad
Remove stones from two cups cherries. To cherries add one cup chopped English walnuts, one cup chopped celery, and three fourths cup mayonnaise. Chill, arrange in lettuce nests, and garnish with one whole cherry on top of each nest.
Cheese Salad No. I Mix two cream cheeses with one cup walnut meat.
Moisten with cream; shape into balls. Chill. Marinate two heads of lettuce; arrange in nests; place five balls in each nest; sprinkle with finely chopped and dried parsley. Pass French dressing with this salad.
Cheese Salad No. 2 Mix two cream cheeses with one half cup chopped pimento. Season with salt and cayenne; moisten with cream. Line a shallow baking pan with paraffin paper; press cheese mixture in this pan to the depth of one inch; cover with paraffin paper, and put under pressure, on ice. When thoroughly chilled, cut in squares; arrange on lettuce leaves; garnish with strips of pimento, radiating from the center. Pass French dressing with this salad. Chestnut Salad No. I Cut two cups of boiled chestnuts in small pieces. Add two cups oranges, cut in small pieces, one tablespoon lemon juice, and one cup mayonnaise. Chill, serve on lettuce, and garnish with grated orange rind.
Chestnut Salad No. 2 Mix two cups boiled chestnuts, one cup celery, and one half cup sour cherries, with one cup cream dressing. Chill and serve on water cress. Garnish with cherries, walnuts and dressing.
Chicken Salad No. I Mix two cups chicken meat cut in small pieces, two cups celery, also cut in small pieces. Marinate with French dressing. Chill. Arrange in salad bowl. Mask with mayonnaise and decorate with hard-cooked eggs, cut in slices, capers, and mayonnaise pressed through a pastry bag and tube.
Chicken Salad No. 2 Mix one cup each, cold cooked chicken cut in pieces, cucumber cut in cubes, and celery cut in pieces. Marinate with French dressing. Chill, drain, mix with one half cup mayonnaise. Arrange in salad bowl; garnish with pimolas, yolks of eggs put through a strainer, whites of eggs chopped fine, mayonnaise, and curled celery.
A run of salad-course recipes from the era when a salad meant fruit or nuts bound in mayonnaise and set into a cup of lettuce. The measurements are sound; the vocabulary and the equipment are what need translating.
- "Two cream cheeses"At this date this most likely meant two of the small retail packages then sold, commonly around 3 oz each, so roughly 6 oz total. Today's 8-oz brick is more cheese than intended; use about three quarters of one, or scale the walnuts and pimiento up accordingly.
- Paraffin paperWaxed paper. For the pressed pimiento cheese, line the pan, press the mixture level, cover, and weight it with a plate and a can; "on ice" simply means in the refrigerator, several hours or overnight, until firm enough to cut clean squares.
- PimolasA trade name for pimiento-stuffed green olives, sliced crosswise for garnish. Any pimiento-stuffed olive works.
- "Marinate" and "mask"To marinate lettuce or diced chicken is to toss it with French dressing and let it stand briefly, then drain — it seasons the ingredient before the mayonnaise goes on. To mask is to coat the mounded salad with mayonnaise so no filling shows.
- Lettuce nestsCup-shaped outer leaves from iceberg or butterhead, chilled crisp in cold water and dried. Limp leaves will not hold a mound of dressed salad.
- Boiled chestnutsScore the flat side, boil 15-20 minutes, and peel while hot — both skins must come off or the salad turns bitter and fibrous. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest shortcut; canned water chestnuts are not the same thing.
- Cherry pitting and browningCherry pitting -- Two cups of pitted cherries is roughly a pound of whole sweet cherries.
- Dressing quantityThree quarters of a cup of mayonnaise to four cups of fruit, nuts and celery is a heavy 1907 coating. Start with half and add more; the salad should look bound, not sauced.
- YieldThe recipes give no yields; each will serve roughly four to six as a salad course. At five balls per nest for two heads of lettuce, the cheese mixture needs to make around 20 walnut-sized balls.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, and published in 1907 — a promotional cookbook that ranged well beyond confectionery into a full domestic-science curriculum. The salad chapter belongs squarely to that moment: mayonnaise had become the standard binder for cold salads of every kind, and the fashionable salad course was fruit, nuts and celery dressed and set into a leaf of lettuce, then finished with piped mayonnaise, sieved egg yolk, capers and radiating strips of pimiento. Celery does the work of texture in nearly every one of these, which reflects how prized and how widely available blanched celery had become by the turn of the century; the cream cheese was sold in small perishable packages rather than the shelf-stable bricks of later decades, which is why it could be named simply by the count. The heavy ornamentation — masking, garnishing, pastry-bag work — was taught in cooking schools of the period as the mark of a properly served table, and it is the reason these recipes read as lists of decorations as much as lists of ingredients.