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Combination Salad
6 medium sized tomatoes 2 rather small cucumbers 6 radishes 1/2 sweet green pepper French salad dressing Arrange the salad on individual plates. Slice the tomato on a lettuce leaf, then add one-third of a cucumber, sliced. Slice the radishes, but do not peel. Arrange the sliced radishes over the tomato and cucumber. Chop the half of a sweet green pepper, taking care that it is a sweet pepper, and sprinkle one-half teaspoon of the chopped pepper on top of the other vegetables. Over this pour a tablespoonful of the French salad dressing. It is particularly important that the vegetables shall be in good condition and that the cucumber and radishes shall be crisp and tender. If somewhat wilted, immerse them in cold water for a half hour or more.
A plate salad rather than a tossed one, assembled in layers and dressed at the last minute. Almost nothing here needs translation, but a few of the assumptions behind it do.
- YieldSix individual plates, as written. The vegetable quantities divide neatly by six, so scaling down is a matter of arithmetic rather than judgement.
- "Taking care that it is a sweet pepper"The warning implies that a green pepper bought at the time could not be assumed sweet, presumably because varieties were not identified at the point of sale. Modern bell peppers are reliably sweet, so the caution is now largely redundant; if you substitute a poblano or similar for flavour, taste a sliver first.
- French salad dressingIn books of this period this means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, the oil usually two to four times the vinegar, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in the United States today. Make a plain vinaigrette.
- The half-teaspoon of pepperThat is the amount per plate, not for the whole dish, and the total half pepper gives you far more than six half-teaspoons. Chop it fine so the small quantity distributes.
- Reviving wilted vegetablesThe cold-water soak is sound and still worth doing: half an hour in cold water re-crisps cucumber and radish by restoring turgor. Dry them well afterwards or the dressing slides off.
- Assemble lateSalt in the dressing pulls water out of sliced tomato and cucumber within minutes. Dress at the table, or at least immediately before serving, or the lettuce leaf sits in a pool.
- Radish skinsThe recipe directs that they not be peeled. Trim the root and top only.
Meatless cookbooks were common in the English-speaking world in the years around the First World War, when wheat, meat and fat conservation campaigns pushed households toward vegetable-centred meals on designated days; a salad like this one, built entirely of raw summer produce and needing no fuel to cook, is the sort of dish such books promoted. Composed salads served on individual plates — arranged rather than tossed, each element visible — were a familiar form in this period, and moulded gelatin salads would become prominent in the decades that followed. The instruction to check that the pepper is sweet suggests a produce trade in which varieties were not reliably identified at the point of sale.