French Salad
1 pint cold diced potatoes 1/2 cup diced cucumbers 1/2 cup diced radishes 1/4 cup grated onion 1 cup cream dressing Salt to taste 1 cup celery Cook the potatoes in boiling, salted water. When cold, cut into half-inch cubes. Peel the cucumber, cut into small cubes and throw into cold water until ready for use. Prepare the radishes in the same way. If the radishes are very tender, the skin may be left on to give a bit of color to the salad. Chop the celery quite fine, remove the vegetables from the water, and dry upon clean towels. Add them to the potatoes. Add the grated onions (the onion may be omitted), and mix all the ingredients with the cream dressing. Garnish with crisp, tender lettuce and red radishes with the skin trimmed back from the root end in such a way as to represent a blossom.
A cold potato salad in the American style of the 1910s, bound with a cooked "cream dressing" rather than mayonnaise. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are the dressing and the seasoning.
- A pint of potatoesMeasurements of this era are by volume, not weight. A pint of half-inch cubes is 2 cups, which works out to roughly 1 lb of potatoes before peeling. Waxy potatoes hold their cubes; a floury baking potato will crumble into the dressing.
- Cook whole, cut coldThe instruction to boil first and cube when cold is the hinge of the recipe. Potatoes boiled in cubes waterlog and break up at the edges, and the salad turns to paste once the dressing goes in.
- Cream dressingIn period cookbooks this usually means a cooked dressing with flour and/or egg, sharpened with vinegar and mustard — rather than whipped cream or bottled mayonnaise, though some versions are simply cream beaten with vinegar and seasoning. A cup of any thick cooked or boiled dressing serves. Plain mayonnaise thinned with a little cream and vinegar is the nearest modern stand-in.
- Grated onionGrating on a box grater gives onion juice rather than pieces, which is the point: the flavour spreads without anyone biting into raw onion. A quarter cup is assertive; the recipe's own note that it may be omitted is worth taking seriously if the salad will sit.
- The cold water soakCucumber and radish are held in cold water to stay crisp, then dried thoroughly. Skipping the drying is what makes a bound potato salad go loose an hour later.
- Salt to tasteSalt the potato cooking water properly, then season again after the dressing is mixed. Cold food reads as less salty than warm, and a cooked dressing is usually already tart, so taste at the end rather than the beginning.
- YieldAbout 5 cups of finished salad, enough for four to six as a side.
- The radish blossomTrim the skin down from the root end in four or five strips and drop the radish into ice water; the strips curl back as the radish crisps. Purely decorative.
Vegetable salads bound with a cooked "cream dressing" were common in turn-of-the-century American domestic-science cooking. The cooked flour-and-egg dressing was often recommended in this period as more digestible and more economical than mayonnaise, which needed a great deal of oil and a steady hand.