Peanut Salad
1 cup shelled peanuts Olive oil 2 cups chopped celery 1 dozen ripe olives Lettuce Soak the peanuts in olive oil; drain and mix with the celery and olives, pitted and minced. Serve on lettuce, adding seasoning or dressing as desired.
A three-ingredient salad from the era when the peanut was still a novelty on the table rather than a snack. The instructions are skeletal, so the decisions left to the cook are worth naming.
- Which peanuts"Shelled" tells us only that the nuts are out of the shell; it does not say whether they are raw or roasted, and both were available. Raw peanuts would be unpleasantly squeaky and beany here, so roasted is the safer reading; rub off the papery skins between your palms if you want a cleaner look.
- The oil soakThe recipe gives no reason for it. One plausible explanation is that oil coats the nuts without the sogginess water or vinegar would cause. Fifteen to thirty minutes in just enough oil to cover is plenty; drain well or the salad turns greasy.
- Ripe olives"Ripe olives" points to what a modern label calls California black olives, canned in brine and mild. Not the same as a cured Kalamata, which would flatten the peanuts entirely. A dozen gives roughly a quarter cup once pitted and minced, depending on size.
- CeleryTwo cups chopped is about four large ribs. Cut it fine, roughly pea-sized, so it sits with the peanuts rather than sliding off the fork separately.
- Seasoning or dressing as desiredThe book leaves the finish to the cook. Salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon is the lightest option; a spoonful of mayonnaise turns it into a bound, creamy salad of the kind also served on lettuce at the time.
- TimingDress and serve within the hour. Held longer, the celery weeps and the peanuts lose the crispness that is the whole point of the dish.
- YieldEnough for four small salad plates as a first or side course, one leaf of lettuce each.
Peanut cookery expanded rapidly in American home books between about 1900 and 1920, when the crop was cheap, southern-grown, and promoted hard as an inexpensive protein. Loose-leaf cookbooks of the sort Mrs. Fryer produced were sold as expandable binders so a cook could file new ideas as they arrived, and salads had a prominent place among them: the crisp, composed, mayonnaise-friendly salad on a lettuce leaf was the fashionable luncheon course of the day. Combining peanuts with celery and olives follows the standard formula of the period, in which a bland crunchy vegetable, a salty accent and a nut or two were arranged more for texture and novelty than for any regional tradition.