Home › Salads › Water-Lily Salad
Water-Lily Salad
1 head lettuce. 6 hard-boiled eggs Mayonnaise dressing Line a circular dish with the lettuce. Cut the whites of the eggs in pieces lengthwise, like the petals of a water-lily. Arrange the pieces in circular form on the lettuce, and in the center pour the yolks of the eggs mixed with Mayonnaise. Or lay a large green leaf on each individual plate and make a small lily with each egg.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooking one, so nearly everything depends on how cleanly the eggs are cut and how the plate is composed. The original assumes you know how to hard-boil an egg and make mayonnaise, and gives no quantities for the lettuce or the dressing.
- The hinge: cold eggs, wet bladeChill the boiled eggs thoroughly before peeling and cutting. Warm whites tear, and a torn petal ruins the effect. Cut with a thin, sharp knife dipped in water between slices, taking six to eight lengthwise wedges from each white.
- Quantities the recipe omitsSix eggs makes one large lily on a platter or six small ones. Add mayonnaise to the yolks a spoonful at a time — a few tablespoons is usually enough to bind them into a soft, moundable paste, not a pourable sauce. One head of lettuce is ample for either version.
- Choosing the lettuce'A large green leaf' is probably best read as a butterhead or Boston lettuce leaf, cupped enough to hold the lily. Romaine hearts or the outer leaves of iceberg also work; anything frilly, like curly endive, fights the shape.
- The yolk centrePress the yolks through a sieve before mixing with the mayonnaise, as for deviled eggs. Season with salt and a little cayenne or paprika — the recipe gives none, and unseasoned yolk paste is flat.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggPeriod mayonnaise was made fresh with raw yolks. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg; if making it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs and keep the finished salad refrigerated until served.
- Yield and timingServes six as a first course or luncheon salad. Assemble no more than an hour ahead — the whites weep and the lettuce wilts under dressing.
Salads like this belong to the era when the salad course was primarily a display piece. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of composed salads shaped into flowers, nests, baskets and birds, built from hard-boiled eggs, moulded aspic, tinted cream cheese and cut vegetables, and named for whatever they resembled. The water-lily was a favourite motif of the period generally, in glass, tile and table decoration alike, and the egg lends itself to it: a hard white shell of petals around a yellow heart. What is really being served here is the deviled egg, taken apart and rearranged — the same sieved yolk bound with mayonnaise, presented as a centrepiece rather than a mouthful.