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Bulgarian Salad
1 cup chopped pecans 1 cup cream cheese, diced 1/4 cup cream 2 tablespoonsfuls lemon juice 1/4 cup cream dressing Marinate the cheese and nuts with the lemon juice. Add the cream to the cream dressing and stir until smooth. Mix the cheese and nuts with the dressing. Serve upon a lettuce leaf.
Cut stalks of celery having deep grooves in them into pieces about two inches long. Fill the grooves with cream cheese salted or flavored with chopped pimientos, and served with bread and butter as a salad course or serve as a relish at the beginning of a meal.
A two-part entry: a bound salad of cheese and pecans, followed by what is really a separate recipe for stuffed celery that the compositor has run into the same paragraph. Treat them as two dishes.
- "Cream dressing" is not creamIn American books of this period a cream dressing is usually a cooked or boiled salad dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, a little flour or mustard, thinned with milk or cream — though the term is also used for simpler uncooked cream-and-vinegar mixtures. A thick mayonnaise slackened with cream is the closest ready-made stand-in; plain cream alone will not bind the salad.
- The cheeseCream cheese here means a fresh soft cheese firm enough to dice, closer to a block Neufchâtel or a well-drained farmer cheese than to whipped tub cheese. Chill it hard before cutting or the cubes will smear into the dressing.
- Dice smallHalf-inch cubes are a sensible working size. Larger and the lemon juice has less surface to work on during the marinating step.
- Marinate brieflyThe recipe gives no time; ten to fifteen minutes in the lemon juice is enough, and a long soak does the cheese no favours.
- Toast the pecansThe recipe does not say to, but a cup of raw pecans in a soft, wet salad reads as damp. Eight minutes at 350F, cooled completely, makes the difference.
- SaltNo salt is specified for the salad and it needs some, particularly if the dressing is a mild homemade cooked one. Season the dressing rather than the marinated cheese.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly four to six salad-course portions on lettuce.
- The celery is a second dishEverything from "Cut stalks of celery" onward is an independent recipe for stuffed celery — soft cheese salted or worked with chopped pimiento, piped or pressed into the channel of the ribs. Choose stalks with a deep groove, as the recipe directs.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a run of American vegetarian and economy cookbooks published in the years around the First World War, when meat conservation was a household virtue. Salads built on nuts and fresh cheese did a specific job in such books: they supplied the fat and protein that a meatless menu otherwise lacked, and pecans in particular were plentiful and cheap in the American South. The name is harder to pin down — nothing about the dish is Bulgarian in any culinary sense, and no source explains the title. Such geographic salad names — Russian, Spanish — were a standing convention of the period and rarely indicated much more than a mood.