Walnut Salad
1 cup walnut meats 1 cup chopped celery Lettuce Mayonnaise dressing Procure the best grade of walnuts and remove the meat from the shells in perfect halves. Mix walnuts and celery with Mayonnaise dressing and serve on crisp lettuce leaves. Apples cored and cut into cubes may be substituted for the celery, or may be added to both nuts and celery if desired.
A four-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the quality of the nuts. Two notes matter more than the rest: buy walnuts that have not gone rancid, and dress the salad at the last minute.
- YieldOne cup of nuts and one cup of celery makes about four modest side servings. Doubling is straightforward; the recipe gives no quantity for the dressing, so use enough to coat — something like a third of a cup of mayonnaise per two cups of solids.
- "Procure the best grade of walnuts"The recipe assumes you buy in the shell and crack them yourself, as shelled nuts kept poorly. Today the equivalent is buying halves from a shop with turnover and tasting one before you commit — rancid walnuts are bitter and soapy and will ruin the bowl.
- Perfect halvesThe instruction is about looks, not flavor. A nutcracker used along the seam, then a pick to lift the meat out of the shell chambers, gives intact halves. If you are using pre-shelled nuts, buy halves rather than pieces.
- BitternessThe papery brown skin on walnuts carries much of their tannin. Toasting the halves for 6 to 8 minutes at 350F firms the texture against the dressing, and rubbing them in a towel afterwards takes off some of the skin, though walnut skins cling more stubbornly than hazelnut ones. It also costs you some of the pale look the recipe is after.
- Mayonnaise dressingPresumably a cross-reference to a mayonnaise recipe elsewhere in the book, which would have been made by hand with raw yolk and oil. Commercial mayonnaise substitutes directly and is made with pasteurized egg; thin it with a spoonful of cream or lemon juice so it coats rather than clumps.
- CeleryUse the inner ribs and the leaves; the outer stalks are stringy and should be peeled with a vegetable peeler if that is all you have. Cut into short pieces about the size of the nut halves so the salad forks up evenly.
- If you add appleA firm tart variety holds its cubes. Toss the cut apple in lemon juice before it meets the mayonnaise or the pieces brown while you assemble.
- TimingDress and serve immediately. Salt in the mayonnaise draws water out of the celery and apple within twenty minutes or so, leaving a thin puddle under the lettuce.
Salads of nuts, celery and mayonnaise on lettuce belong to a turn-of-the-century fashion, when mayonnaise moved from a garnish for cold fish to the standard binder for anything chopped and chilled. The apple-and-celery version noted here as a substitution is the combination generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s; walnuts were not in the earliest published forms of that salad and are usually said to have been added later, which is more or less what is happening on this page — the nuts lead and the apple is optional. Mrs. Fryer's book came out in loose-leaf form, and salads like this one are exactly the sort of short, adaptable entry that format suits: a ratio and a permission slip rather than a fixed formula.