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Apple and Celery Salad
2 cups diced apples 2 cups cut celery 1 cup cream salad dressing To prepare the apples, peel and cut as nearly as possible into half-inch cubes. Marinate the apples with a tablespoonful of lemon juice. Mix well in order to prevent discoloration. Cut the celery quite finely and mix with the apples. Mix these ingredients with the cream salad dressing and serve with a garnish of lettuce.
A straightforward salad that depends on two things the original assumes you already have: a cooked cream dressing and apples firm enough to hold a cube.
- Cream salad dressingIn books of this era the term usually points to a cooked boiled dressing — egg, vinegar, a little flour or mustard — enriched or thinned with cream, though some versions are simply cream soured with vinegar. Either way it is not whipped cream and not modern bottled mayonnaise. A thick mayonnaise loosened with two or three tablespoons of cream gives much the same effect.
- Apple choiceYou need a variety that stays crisp when diced and dressed: Granny Smith, Braeburn, Honeycrisp. A softer apple collapses into the dressing within the hour.
- The lemon juice is the hingeOne tablespoon over 2 cups of cubes is barely enough, and the recipe is right to insist on mixing well. Toss the apples with the juice the moment they are cut, before you touch the celery, or the cut faces brown.
- "Cut celery" quantityTwo cups of finely cut celery is roughly four to six ribs from the pale inner heart. Outer ribs are stringy at this size of cut; peel them or keep them for stock.
- Dressing amountA full cup of dressing for 4 cups of fruit and celery is generous by current taste. Start with half, toss, and add the rest only if it looks dry.
- TimingDress it no more than about 30 minutes before serving. Celery weeps salt water and apples soften, and the dressing thins out as they sit.
- YieldAbout four to six side servings. Serve on whole lettuce leaves rather than shredded lettuce, which wilts under the dressing.
This is the plain skeleton of what most cooks now call a Waldorf salad — apple, celery and a cream-thickened dressing — a combination generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s, where the original is said to have contained no nuts at all; walnuts became standard only later. Celery itself was still a semi-luxury vegetable in this period, sold blanched and pale and often set out in a special glass on the table, which may account for the generous quantity of it here.