Home › Salads › Peas and Celery Salad
Peas and Celery Salad
1 can peas 1 1/2 cups chopped celery 1 cup cream dressing 1 onion 1/3 teaspoon salt Drain the juice from one can of peas, wash, drain again. Add to the peas the grated onion, salt, and chopped celery. Mix all with the cream dressing, scant measure, and garnish with lettuce.
A three-ingredient salad that depends almost entirely on the dressing and on how heavy a hand you use with the onion. Two things in the original need translating: what "cream dressing" meant in a period cookbook, and what a whole grated onion will do to a bowl of peas.
- Cream dressingNot whipped cream and not mayonnaise. In books of this era the name usually covers either a cooked or boiled dressing (egg yolks, vinegar, a little flour or mustard, thinned with milk or cream and cooled) or a simpler uncooked mixture of cream sharpened with vinegar. A modern substitute is mayonnaise slackened with a spoonful of cream and sharpened with vinegar or lemon.
- Scant measure"Scant" means slightly under the stated cup. The salad should be coated, not swimming; start with about two-thirds of a cup and add more only if the peas look dry.
- One can of peasPeriod cans varied; a standard modern 15-oz can, giving roughly 1 1/2 cups drained, is a reasonable stand-in and sits in proportion with the 1 1/2 cups of celery. The instruction to wash them is worth keeping — it rinses off the starchy packing liquid.
- The onionA whole grated onion will overwhelm the dish. Grate 1 to 2 teaspoons of pulp and juice from a mild onion and taste before adding more; a large modern Spanish onion in particular would swamp the peas.
- Chill and drain againGrated onion and salt draw water out of the celery. Mix, refrigerate 30 minutes, then pour off any liquid that has collected before serving, or the dressing will slide off.
- Garnish with lettuceMost likely leaves arranged under or around the salad — either a cupped leaf per portion or a lining of leaves — rather than shredded lettuce tossed through.
- YieldServes four as a side, or two as a light lunch course.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world around the First World War, when meat conservation was a matter of public campaign as much as economy, and they leaned hard on canned goods — the can being cheap, shelf-stable, and by then thoroughly respectable in middle-class kitchens. This salad shares some of those habits: nothing is cooked, the vegetables come from a tin and a stalk, and the whole thing is held together by a boiled dressing that could be made in quantity and kept. Peas and celery is an old pairing in Anglo-American cooking, generally on the logic that the celery supplies the crunch and saline bite the peas lack. The lettuce leaf underneath was a common convention in salad service of the day, functioning as much as a plate liner as an ingredient.