Marine Salad
4 cucumbers 2 green peppers 1 onion French dressing Scoop out the inside of the unpeeled cucumbers, which will then have the appearance of small green boats. Chop the pulp thus removed with the peppers and onion and mix well with French dressing. Fill the boats and in the bow of each erect a white sail cut from paper and fastened to a long toothpick.
A novelty salad built around presentation rather than technique. The only real work is keeping the cucumber shells from flooding.
- Salt and drain the shellsCucumber pulp releases a great deal of water once chopped and dressed. Salt the hollowed shells lightly and invert them on a rack for 20 minutes, then blot dry before filling, or the boats sit in a puddle within minutes.
- Choose the right cucumberThe recipe only specifies that the cucumbers be left unpeeled, which suggests a firm, thicker-skinned field cucumber that will hold its shape. A modern English or hothouse cucumber is thinner-walled and softer; halve it lengthwise and scoop shallowly, or use small Kirby cucumbers for individual portions.
- Drain the filling tooChop the pulp, then press it in a sieve or squeeze in a towel before dressing. Undrained pulp thins the French dressing to water.
- Onion quantityOne whole onion to four cucumbers is aggressive by current taste. A small shallot or a few tablespoons of finely minced sweet onion is a safer starting point; raw onion also intensifies as the salad stands.
- French dressingIn American books of this period this means a simple vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine. It does not mean the sweetened orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Assemble lateDress and fill within half an hour of serving. Held longer, the shells go limp and the peppers weep.
- YieldAs written, each hollowed cucumber is one boat with one sail, so four boats. Halving them lengthwise instead gives eight smaller boats and is easier to fill and to eat, though it departs from the original.
- The sailsUse a plain wooden pick and untreated paper, and remove them at the table. Colored or printed paper may bleed dye into the dressing.
Salads like this belong to the era of the "fancy" or "conceit" salad, which ran through American cookery from roughly the 1890s into the 1930s, when hostesses were expected to send something to the table that looked like something else: tomatoes cut as poinsettias, pears as candles, cucumbers as canoes. Cookbooks of the period carried whole chapters of them, and the decorative salad was treated as a standard part of the repertoire rather than a stunt. The technique underneath is older and plainer: hollowing a vegetable, dressing its own flesh, and returning it to the shell is a stuffing method found across European cooking. What dates this version is the paper sail, and the assumption that a cold salad's job was partly to entertain.