Shrimp Salad
Marinate two cups of shrimps with French dressing.
Add one half cup each of olives and pimentos. Chill one hour. Drain; add one half cup of mayonnaise dressing; serve on lettuce and garnish with whole shrimps.
A simple composed salad that depends almost entirely on draining well before the mayonnaise goes in. Two things in it have shifted meaning since 1907: French dressing and shrimp itself.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a plain vinaigrette — roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, shaken. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Quantity of shrimpTwo cups of cooked, peeled shrimp is roughly 10 to 12 ounces, which will take something over a pound of shell-on raw shrimp. Reserve six to eight of the largest whole for the garnish before cutting the rest.
- Canned versus freshThe recipe does not specify, and canned shrimp was a common pantry item at the time, so it may well be what is meant. If you use canned, rinse and drain to shed the brine; if you cook your own, two to three minutes in salted water is enough and they should be cooled before marinating.
- OlivesGreen olives, pitted and sliced, are the likely reading, though the recipe does not say; pimento-stuffed ones are consistent with the recipe rather than redundant. Rinse very salty olives or the mayonnaise will taste harsh.
- PimentosSweet red peppers preserved in cans or jars, sold under that name for decades and still available near the olives. Drain and dice; roasted red peppers are a close stand-in.
- The draining stepAfter the hour in the refrigerator the vinaigrette will have drawn liquid out of the shrimp and peppers. Drain it hard, and blot if necessary, or the mayonnaise slackens into a pink puddle on the lettuce.
- Assemble lateDress with mayonnaise just before serving. Held longer, the salt continues to pull water and the salad weeps.
- YieldEnough for four as a first course or a light lunch, on whole lettuce leaves used as cups.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like many house cookbooks of the era it surrounded its advertising chapters with a full general household repertoire. A salad like this one belongs to the great age of the American mayonnaise salad, when reliable canned goods — shrimp, pimentos, olives — meant a cook far from any coast could put a seafood salad on the table in the middle of winter. Commercial canned pimentos were a relatively new convenience in this period — their US production is generally associated with the early 1900s and with Georgia growing from around 1911 — and they turn up in period cookbooks with a frequency that reflects how new and how convenient a bright red garnish then was. The two-stage dressing, a vinaigrette marinade drained off before mayonnaise is added, is a technique repeated across the salad chapters of this generation of books; it seasons the shrimp through rather than merely coating it.