Celery Salad
3 cups cut celery 1 cup cream dressing Mix the celery with the cream dressing. Garnish with water cress or celery tops.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have a jar of cream dressing in the icebox, which is where most of the work lives.
- Cream dressingThis is not whipped cream and not modern bottled dressing. In books of this period the name usually covers a cooked dressing: egg yolk, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, sugar, mustard and salt thickened over hot water and finished with cream or milk, though some books use it for a simpler uncooked cream-and-vinegar dressing. A mayonnaise thinned with a few tablespoons of cream is the closest quick substitute; a boiled dressing will be closer in flavour.
- Quantity of dressingOne cup to three cups of celery is a heavy coating by current taste. Start with half and add the rest only if the celery still looks dry.
- Cut celeryThe recipe does not specify a size; crosswise pieces of roughly a quarter to a half inch are a reasonable reading. Use the inner stalks and the pale heart; outer ribs from a modern head are stringy enough to want peeling with a vegetable peeler.
- Keep it cold and dress it lateSalt in the dressing draws water out of celery fairly quickly and thins everything down. Chill the cut celery in ice water, drain and dry it thoroughly, then dress just before serving.
- Water cressSold today as watercress in bunches or clamshells. Rinse well and pick off thick stems; the peppery leaves are the point of the garnish, not decoration alone.
- Celery topsThe leafy tops that supermarkets often trim away. If your celery arrives without them, use flat-leaf parsley or the pale yellow inner leaves.
- YieldThree cups of dressed celery serves four as a side salad, or six if it is going on lettuce leaves as a first course.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in American households from the 1880s through the 1920s, sold upright in tall cut-glass celery vases and served plain as a relish at formal dinners, which is why so many books of the period treat it as worth a recipe of its own. Vegetarian and reform cookery of the early twentieth century leaned hard on salads and raw vegetables, and celery's crispness and salinity made it one of the few vegetables that could carry a dish without meat stock or bacon fat. The cream dressing here is the older American style of salad dressing, cooked and egg-thickened.