Egg Salad
Cut six hard-cooked eggs radishes in crosswise slices. layers on a bed of lettuce. and radish roses. in slices, crosswise. Cut twelve Marinate each, and arrange in Garnish with cream dressing Egg Salad No. 2 Cut six eggs in halves, lengthwise; remove yolks; add an equal amount of cold cooked ham, chopped; moisten with cream dressing, return to whites, and serve on a bed of water cress, chicory, or shredded lettuce. Pass cream dressing with this salad.
Egg Salad No. 3 Remove the yolks from six hard-cooked eggs, leaving the whites in rings. Mash yolks; add an equal amount of cold cooked veal or lamb, cut in small pieces. Moisten with French dressing; add one teaspoon chopped chives; shape into balls; and arrange on bed of lettuce. Garnish with white egg rings.
Three variations on stuffed and sliced egg salads. The first has come through the scanner badly jumbled — the sentences have been interleaved — but the intent is clear enough to reconstruct.
- Reading No. 1Untangled, it reads: cut six hard-cooked eggs in crosswise slices; cut twelve radishes in crosswise slices; marinate each, and arrange in layers on a bed of lettuce; garnish with cream dressing and radish roses. Nothing is missing but the word order.
- "Marinate"In period salad writing this generally means tossing the components in a little French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper) and letting them stand briefly before assembly. It is a seasoning step rather than a long soak.
- Cream dressingPeriod cream dressings vary: some are cooked, egg- or flour-thickened boiled dressings, others simply cream beaten with vinegar and seasoning. Whichever Lowney's intends, a thick boiled dressing, or mayonnaise loosened with a spoonful of cream, is the nearest modern stand-in.
- Hard-cooked eggsFor clean yolks and whites firm enough to hold as rings, cover the eggs with water, bring just to a boil, cover and hold off the heat about twelve minutes, then chill in cold water. A hard rolling boil gives the green-grey yolk ring and rubbery whites that ruin the look of a stuffed egg.
- ChicoryIn an American book of this date chicory means curly endive — the frizzy pale-green head — not Belgian endive and not the blue-flowered root used for coffee.
- The meat in Nos. 2 and 3Both call for cold cooked ham, veal or lamb in equal volume to the yolks. Six yolks give roughly a third to a half cup, so about that much finely chopped meat; chop it fine enough to bind, or the balls in No. 3 will not hold their shape.
- Yield and holdingSix eggs serve four to six as a first course or luncheon salad. Dressed egg and cream dressing should be assembled shortly before serving and kept refrigerated until then.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is best remembered for its confectionery, but like most American household books of its decade it carries a full salad chapter. The stuffed halved egg, filled with its own mashed yolk plus something richer, was standard cold-luncheon and picnic fare, and the third variation here is simply that filling rolled into balls instead of returned to the white. The use of odd scraps of cold ham, veal or lamb is characteristic of the period's frugality.