Waldorf Salad
Mix two cups of celery cut fine, one dozen walnuts chopped, and one cup of diced apples. Serve on lettuce leaves covered with French dressing. The apple should be put in water as soon as it is cut to prevent discoloration.
A lean, early version of the salad — celery-heavy, dressed with vinaigrette rather than mayonnaise. A few notes on quantities and handling.
- "One dozen walnuts"Probably twelve whole nuts, i.e. twenty-four halves, which would come to roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup chopped; it may equally mean twelve kernels, which would be half that. Buying shelled halves, about 2/3 cup loosely packed before chopping suits the larger reading.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn American books of this period French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, usually three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweetened orange-red bottled product that took the name later. The early hotel versions of the salad were bound with mayonnaise, so the vinaigrette here is the departure.
- The proportions are celery-forwardTwo parts celery to one of apple makes a crisp, savoury salad rather than a sweet one. If you want the modern balance, reverse it: two cups apple to one of celery.
- Acidulate the apple waterPlain water slows browning only a little. A squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of vinegar in the bowl works properly, and the apple should be drained and patted dry before dressing or the vinaigrette will slide off.
- Apple choiceA firm, tart variety holds its shape and its flavour against oil and vinegar — Granny Smith, Braeburn, a good russet. Soft mealy apples collapse into the dressing.
- Toast the walnutsNot in the original, but five to seven minutes in a 350F oven, cooled before chopping, sharpens the flavour considerably and keeps the pieces from going soft in the dressing.
- Dress at the last momentCelery and apple both weep once salted. Combine, dress and serve within a few minutes; a salad held an hour sits in a pool of its own liquid.
- YieldAbout three cups of salad, enough for four as a side course on lettuce leaves.
The salad is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s and to Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name is attached to much of the hotel's cooking; the earliest published versions are apple, celery and mayonnaise, with the walnuts arriving a little later and quickly becoming inseparable from the name. Its appearance in a meatless cookery book is no accident: vegetarian and reform cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned hard on nuts as the protein that would replace meat, and a salad that already contained walnuts needed no adaptation at all. The instruction to drop the cut apple into water is the sort of practical note that recurs throughout these books, written for households without the refrigeration or the packaged antioxidants that make the problem invisible to us.