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Chiffonade Salad
Cut celery into one-inch pieces, and pieces into straws, until one cup is obtained. Remove the pulp from grape fruit, making one cup. Remove the skin, and slice four medium-sized tomatoes. Break chicory leaves into pieces for serving. Marinate all separately with French dressing. Arrange in separate mounds on a serving dish. Garnish each with chopped chives, green peppers cut in strips, and parsley. Pass French and mayonnaise dressing.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the method is the point: each element is dressed on its own and kept in its own mound. A few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- Chicory hereIn American books of this period "chicory" usually means curly endive (frisée) rather than Belgian endive or radicchio. Either curly endive or escarole gives the intended bitter, frilly base.
- Grapefruit segments"Remove the pulp" means getting the flesh free of peel, pith and membrane; period books were not fussy about whether the segments stayed whole. Work over a bowl; one cup takes roughly one large grapefruit.
- Celery strawsOne-inch lengths split lengthwise into thin batons. Cut them ahead and hold in ice water for 20 minutes if you want them to stay rigid under dressing.
- Marinate separatelyThis is the hinge of the dish. Dressing each component alone keeps the tomato juice out of the celery and the grapefruit acid off the greens. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough; longer and the tomatoes weep and the chicory collapses.
- French dressing, 1900s senseOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion — not the sweetened orange bottled dressing the name now suggests. The recipe gives no proportions; something in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar works, and go light on it given the grapefruit.
- Green peppersRaw green bell pepper, cut into thin strips. Nothing hot is intended.
- YieldNo yield is given. The quantities (a cup each of celery and grapefruit, four tomatoes, chicory) would stretch to about four as a first course, or six alongside a larger meal.
- ServingAssemble shortly before it goes to table, or the mounds lose their definition. Both dressings are passed at table so diners can choose the sharp or the rich.
Chiffonade in French cookery means "made of rags" — shredded greens or herbs cut into ribbons — and the word attached itself to a family of salads built on finely cut vegetables, sometimes said to carry a garnish of chopped hard-boiled egg or beet in restaurant versions. This one has taken the name loosely, keeping the shredded celery and torn chicory but arranging everything in separate mounds rather than mixing it. That kind of arrangement is often associated with American hotel and club dining around 1900, when a salad was expected to look designed on the platter. Grapefruit is the telling ingredient: it was still a comparative novelty in northern kitchens at the turn of the century, arriving from Florida groves that had only recently begun shipping in commercial quantity, and cookbooks of the period put it into salads partly to show it off. Lowney's, a chocolate company, published its cook book as a general household volume rather than a confectionery manual, and salads like this reflect the ambitions of its intended readership.