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Vegetable Salad
Mix one cup cold cooked potatoes, one cup tomato jelly cut in cubes, and one cup cold cooked peas. Marinate with French dressing; arrange on a salad dish; mask with mayonnaise or cream dressing, and garnish with slices of tomato around the edge, and mounds of peas alternating with mounds of chopped pimolas. Vegetable Oyster or Salsify Salad Mix two cups cold cooked salsify, cut in small pieces, with a French dressing; let it stand one hour. Rub salad bowl with clove of garlic. Arrange bed of cress in salad bowl; cover with two tablespoons cream dressing. Cover with drained salsify, and cover whole with cream dressing. Garnish with radish roses.
Two composed salads of the early 1900s, built to be looked at as much as eaten. Most of the work is in the components the recipe assumes you already have on hand.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento. Any jar of pimiento-stuffed Spanish olives will do; chop them small so the red shows.
- Tomato jellyNot a preserve but a savoury aspic: seasoned tomato juice set with gelatin, chilled in a shallow pan and cut into cubes. Roughly a tablespoon of powdered gelatin per 2 cups of juice is the usual proportion; err on the firmer side if the cubes are to hold their edges in the salad.
- Cream dressingIn cook books of this period the term generally means a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour and finished with cream, rather than whipped cream. Such dressings are tarter and looser than mayonnaise, thin enough to pour over the salsify as a coating.
- MaskA period term for coating a dish completely with sauce so the components underneath are hidden. Spoon it over rather than tossing.
- SalsifyAlso sold as oyster plant or, in a related species, scorzonera. Peel under cold water with a little lemon or vinegar added, as the cut flesh browns within minutes, and simmer until a knife slides in easily, roughly 20 to 30 minutes depending on thickness.
- MarinatingThe hour given for the salsify matters more than it looks; the roots are bland and take up the vinaigrette as they stand. The potato and pea mixture benefits from the same treatment.
- Garlic in the bowlA cut clove rubbed round the salad bowl was a common way of getting garlic into a salad at this date. It leaves a faint trace only.
- YieldThree cups of mixed vegetables would serve about four as a side salad; the salsify version, with its bed of cress, is of similar size.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many cookbooks that firms issued to keep their product in the kitchen, though the salad chapter has nothing to do with cocoa. Both recipes belong to the era of the composed or "masked" salad, when a salad's merit lay in its architecture: cubes, mounds, garnishing rings of tomato and radish roses, all bound under a blanket of dressing. Salsify was a common winter root in American markets through the nineteenth century, sold as "oyster plant" for a faint shellfish note that cooks of the time claimed to taste in it; it faded from general use in the twentieth century and is now chiefly a farmers' market vegetable. The pairing of French dressing to marinate and a heavier cooked dressing to coat is characteristic of the period's household manuals, which treated the two as distinct tools rather than alternatives.