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Rice and Vegetable Salad
Mix one cup each of celery, carrots and rice. Marinate all separately with French dressing. Arrange on lettuce leaves in shape of a mound, having rice at the bottom and carrots at the top. Garnish with spoonfuls of mayonnaise on the lettuce.
A composed salad written in the shorthand of 1907, when a cook was assumed to know that the rice and carrots arrive at the table already cooked and cold. Two lines carry the whole method: marinate the three elements separately, then stack them.
- The hinge: marinate separatelyDressing each component on its own keeps the colors and flavors distinct and stops the rice from soaking up everything. Give each 20-30 minutes in the dressing, then drain off the excess before building the mound or the lettuce will collapse.
- RiceOne cup means one cup cooked and cooled, from roughly a third of a cup raw long-grain. Rinse and cool it spread on a tray so the grains stay separate; sticky rice will not take dressing evenly.
- Carrots and celeryBoth should be cut in small even dice, about a quarter inch. The recipe does not say whether the carrots are cooked; period salads of this kind often used cooked carrot, and raw grated carrot works but gives a very different, wetter salad.
- French dressing, 1907 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion. Period books give ratios ranging from about two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. Figure on half a cup total for three cups of vegetables and rice.
- AssemblyBuild on individual plates rather than one platter. A small cup or ramekin packed with each layer and inverted gives a neater mound than free-hand spooning.
- The mayonnaiseIt sits on the lettuce as a garnish, not over the mound. Spoonfuls of a thick homemade or good commercial mayonnaise, placed at intervals, are what the original intends.
- Yield and servingThree cups of dressed material makes four modest salad plates. Serve cold, and dress no more than an hour ahead or the celery loses its snap.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many house cookbooks American food firms published to keep their name in the kitchen. Its salad chapter belongs squarely to the era of the molded, architectural salad, when a dish was judged largely on how it looked on the plate: layered mounds, cases cut from tomatoes and peppers, and mayonnaise applied as decoration rather than as a coating. Rice turns up in salads of this period partly as an economy and partly as a pale base color to set off vegetables.