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Escarole Salad
Prepare the same as Endive Salad, and sprinkle with finely chopped green peppers.
Lettuce Salad No. I Separate the leaves from two heavy heads of lettuce. Wash, drain, chill; marinate with French dressing. Chill; replace in former shape, making one head out of the two, having all green leaves on the outside.
Lettuce Salad No. 2 Remove leaves from lettuce. Wash, drain, and dry.
Place leaves together, roll, and cut in narrow ribbons. Marinate with French dressing. Arrange in nests, with a tablespoon of mayonnaise in each nest.
Lobster Salad No. I Marinate four cups lobster in French dressing. Chill, drain, mix with one cup mayonnaise dressing, and arrange on white lettuce leaves. Garnish with mayonnaise and pounded lobster coral.
Lobster Salad No. 2 Mix two cups lobster meat with four hard-cooked eggs, chopped fine. Marinate with French dressing. Drain; add mayonnaise; serve on lettuce; garnish with chopped olives, and sprinkle with finely chopped chives.
Lobster Salad No. 3 Mix equal parts of cucumbers cut in cubes, lobster cut in pieces, tomatoes cut in pieces, with mayonnaise dressing. Chill; arrange on lettuce leaves; garnish with alternate slices of tomatoes and cucumbers; and mayonnaise dressing put through the pastry bag and tube.
This page runs several salads together, all built on the same method: dress the main ingredient first, chill it, drain it, then finish with mayonnaise. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- The instruction that carries the pageMost of these salads marinate the main ingredient in French dressing and then drain it before mayonnaise goes anywhere near it (Lobster No. 3 skips the French dressing entirely). Skipping the drain leaves vinegar and oil to thin the mayonnaise into a slick on the plate. Drain in a sieve for several minutes and blot lobster meat dry.
- French dressing, 1907 senseFrench dressing, period sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled dressing. In this period it means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion and used at once; proportions vary, commonly two to three parts oil to one of vinegar.
- Escarole and endiveBoth are chicories. The cross-reference means: wash, dry, tear or shred the leaves, dress them with French dressing, and here add finely chopped green bell pepper. Escarole's outer leaves are tough and bitter; use the pale heart and save the dark outer leaves for soup.
- Lobster quantitiesFour cups of picked lobster meat is roughly 1 1/4 lb; two cups around 10 oz. At the usual yield of about a quarter of live weight, that is somewhere between three and four 1 1/2 lb lobsters for the larger quantity and about two for the smaller. None of these salads names a yield.
- CoralThe dark green roe found only in female lobsters, which turns coral red when cooked. Cook it through, press it through a sieve, and use it dry as a garnish. If you buy lobster already cooked, or buy a male, there may be no coral at all.
- TomalleyThe soft green liver in the body cavity was eaten in this period. Current shellfish advisories recommend against eating it, as contaminants concentrate there. Use the coral if you have it and discard the tomalley.
- Raw-egg mayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil, vinegar and seasoning, held cold. If serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise; the salad tastes the same.
- Reassembling the lettuceLettuce Salad No. 1 asks you to rebuild two dressed heads into one, green leaves outward. It needs firm, well-shaped heads and leaves dried thoroughly before dressing so they still stack. Assemble on the serving plate, not in a bowl.
- Chiffonade nestsSalad No. 2 is a chiffonade: stack the leaves, roll them tight, and cut across into ribbons. Cut close to serving time, since cut lettuce edges discolour.
Lowney's Cook Book belongs to the era when the composed salad was a marker of a well-run American table, and this page shows the form at its most characteristic: cold protein or greens dressed, shaped into a nest or rebuilt into a head, then finished with mayonnaise piped through a pastry bag. The lobster salads assume a home cook who would boil and pick her own lobsters, coral and all. Escarole and endive appear in American cookbooks of this period usually filed together as bitter salad greens under whatever spelling the compiler preferred, which is why escarole here gets nothing but a cross-reference and a handful of chopped green pepper.