Chicory Salad
Separate leaves; marinate with French dressing. Serve crisp and cold.
Cucumber Salad No. I Cut four cucumbers in strips, lengthwise, then in halfinch pieces. Add one cup sweetbreads cooked, and cut in small pieces. Mix with cream dressing, chill, and serve on crisp lettuce.
Cucumber Salad No. 2 Cut six small cucumbers in slices, not quite severing them. Cover with French dressing, chill, and serve one to each person.
Cucumber Salad No. 3 Mix one cup each of cucumber cut in cubes, cooked oysters cut in pieces, and celery cut in pieces. Add one cup cream dressing. Chill. Arrange on lettuce leaves in salad bowl.
Four salads run together in one block of type, all of them assembled rather than cooked. The work is in the dressings and in the preparation of the sweetbreads and oysters, which the book assumes you already know.
- What chicory means hereIn American cookbooks of this period "chicory" may mean witloof, the pale forced head sold today as Belgian endive, or the frizzy green now labelled curly endive or frisée; the two names were used loosely and interchangeably. Either works here, and the recipe gives no way to settle which was meant.
- French dressingNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. At this date it meant a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine, sometimes with a little onion juice. Period ratios vary from roughly two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. Dress chicory just before serving or the leaves weep.
- Cream dressingAn ambiguous term in this era. It is either a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg and finished with cream, or mayonnaise let down with heavy cream to a coating consistency. Either suits the sweetbread and oyster salads; the book does not say which it means.
- SweetbreadsThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart) of a young animal, still sold by good butchers and often by special order. They need soaking in several changes of cold water, then a gentle simmer in acidulated water for about 15 minutes, then cooling under a weight and peeling off the membrane before dicing. A pair will usually give a cup of diced meat or more, depending on size.
- Cooked oystersPoach shucked oysters in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, well under two minutes, then lift them out and cool. Longer and they tighten into rubber, which no amount of cream dressing will disguise.
- The accordion cucumber"Not quite severing them" describes a fan cut: slice down through the cucumber at close intervals, stopping short of the base so the slices stay joined. The dressing runs into the cuts. It works only with small, thin-skinned cucumbers; a waxed supermarket cucumber should be peeled first, which weakens the fan.
- ChillingHalf an hour in the refrigerator is enough for the dressing to penetrate. Cucumbers left in a vinaigrette much longer than an hour go limp and shed water into the bowl.
- YieldEach of the composed salads makes four to six servings on lettuce. Cucumber Salad No. 2 is explicitly one cucumber per person, so six.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — a promotional cookbook of the kind that flourished when American food firms discovered that a general household manual sold their product better than an advertisement. The salad chapter reflects the moment when salads stopped being a plate of dressed greens and became composed dishes built on cream dressings, a fashion carried out of hotel dining rooms and into ambitious home kitchens. Sweetbreads, a prized and comparatively expensive item at this date, and oysters, cheap and plentiful in the Northeast at the time, turn up constantly in such combinations; the same pairing of an organ meat or shellfish with celery and a bound dressing produced the chicken salads and lobster salads of every church supper of the period. Forced chicory, something of a luxury green, marks the recipe as aimed at a household with a good grocer.