Waldorf Salad
Mix one cup each of small pieces of celery, apple cut in balls, and English walnuts broken in small pieces. Add one teaspoon salt, two tablespoons orange juice, and the grated rind of one orange. Add one cup mayonnaise dressing. Serve in lettuce nests or in apple cups, made by scooping out the pulp. Garnish with mayonnaise dressing and pieces of the apple skin cut in fancy shapes.
A straightforward assembly job, but the proportions belong to a period when salad dressing was treated as a sauce rather than a binder. Two numbers want attention before you start.
- Cut the saltOne teaspoon of salt for three cups of fruit, nuts and celery is aggressive by current taste, especially on top of a cup of mayonnaise that is already salted. A quarter teaspoon, added at the end and tasted, does the work.
- A cup of mayonnaise is a lotThat much dressing coats the salad into a paste. Start with a third of a cup, fold, and add more only if the apple still looks dry. Reserving a spoonful for the garnish the recipe asks for is worth doing.
- Apple cut in ballsUse a small melon baller on a firm, crisp apple with the skin left on for colour, or simply dice it — the shape is decorative, not structural. Toss the cut apple in the orange juice immediately so it does not brown.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the native black walnut, which is much stronger. Toasting them at 350F for six or seven minutes sharpens the flavour and keeps them from going soft in the dressing.
- The orangeGrate the zest before you juice the fruit. One orange will give considerably more than the two tablespoons of juice the recipe asks for, and roughly a tablespoon of grated rind, which is about right; take the zest without digging into the white pith.
- Apple cupsCut the top from a large apple, hollow it with a spoon leaving a shell about a third of an inch thick, and rub the inside with lemon or orange juice. They will hold about half a cup each.
- Yield and timingServes four to six as a side. Mix the celery, nuts and dressing ahead if you like, but fold in the apple no more than half an hour before serving or it weeps and softens.
The salad is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s, where it is credited to the maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky; the earliest published versions contain only apple, celery and mayonnaise, with the walnuts arriving later and becoming standard by the 1920s. That makes this version, with its walnuts, orange juice and grated rind, a fairly early elaboration on the original — the sort of refinement a cookbook of the 1900s liked to offer. Its presence in Lowney's Cook Book, published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, is a reminder that these promotional cookbooks were general household manuals first and advertisements second: a full salad chapter, dressings included, alongside the chocolate work the book existed to sell. The apple cups and skin cut in fancy shapes belong to the same era's enthusiasm for the composed, garnished salad served on a lettuce leaf, a fashion that ran from the hotel dining room straight into the home kitchen.