Onion Salad
Peel six Bermuda onions. Slice, and let them stand one hour in ice water. Drain, sprinkle with sugar, and marinate with French dressing. Serve ice cold on cress. Potato Salad No. I Cut raw potatoes in balls with French vegetable cutter. Cook three cups of these balls with one sliced onion in boiling salted water until tender. Chill, marinate with French dressing, cover with boiled dressing, arrange on salad dish. Sprinkle with chopped chives, and garnish with a daisy made of hard-cooked eggs, cut lengthwise. Potato Salad No. 2 Marinate one cup each of cold cooked potatoes, cut in dice, cold cooked turnip, also cut in dice, and cold cooked beets, finely chopped. Arrange in salad dish, separating each vegetable with small leaves of parsley.
Three salads run together in one block of type, as often happens in books of this vintage. The onion salad is the headline; the two potato salads follow without a break.
- Bermuda onionsA large, flat, mild onion once shipped in quantity from Bermuda and later grown in Texas. Any sweet onion — Vidalia, Walla Walla, Cipollini at a pinch — gives the same effect; a standard yellow storage onion will be far too harsh for this treatment.
- The ice-water hour is the pointSoaking sliced raw onion in ice water leaches out the sulphur compounds that make it bite and firms the slices so they stay crisp under dressing. Do not shorten it, and drain thoroughly or the dressing will slide off.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn 1907 this is oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine — period proportions vary, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in America today.
- Boiled dressingPotato Salad No. 1 calls for 'boiled dressing' without specifying it. Period boiled dressings are typically cooked custards of egg, vinegar and mustard with a little flour or butter, thickened over water and chilled — generally tarter and looser than mayonnaise; mayonnaise thinned with vinegar is the nearest ready substitute.
- French vegetable cutterA parisienne scoop or melon baller. Cut the balls from peeled raw potatoes and keep them in cold water until they go into the pot, or they will darken.
- Cooking the raw ballsThree cups of small potato balls in boiling salted water are tender in about 8 to 12 minutes depending on size. Test one early — they overshoot into mush quickly, and the shape is the whole reason for cutting them this way.
- CressWatercress or garden cress, used as the bed rather than a garnish. Rinse and dry it well; wet cress dilutes the dressing.
- The egg daisyThe recipe says only that the eggs are hard-cooked and cut lengthwise. The usual reading is lengthwise sections laid in a ring as petals, with yolk in the centre; assemble it just before serving.
- YieldThe recipe states no yields. Six onions is a generous quantity, and the potato salads use about three cups of vegetables each, so each dish suits a small table rather than one or two people.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, as promotional cookery — which explains the confident chapter on candy and the otherwise conventional American household repertoire around it. A salad course of this kind was a mark of a well-run Edwardian table: cold, composed, moulded or arranged into shapes, and dressed either with plain vinaigrette or with the cooked "boiled dressing" familiar in home kitchens of the period. The Bermuda onion itself is a period marker. Sweet flat onions were shipped to the eastern United States from Bermuda in large volume through the second half of the nineteenth century, and the name stuck to the type even as Texas growers entered the trade, so that a cook in 1907 read "Bermuda onion" as a description of mildness rather than of origin.