Winter Salad
1 small head lettuce 1 lemon 2 juicy apples 1/2 cup chopped celery Mayonnaise dressing Pare the apples and lemon and cut them into thin slices. Mix thoroughly with the celery and cover with Mayonnaise or French dressing. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves.
A three-ingredient winter salad from the era before year-round produce, when apples, celery and citrus were what a northern kitchen still had in February. It works, but two lines need reading closely.
- The lemon is eaten, not squeezed"Pare the apples and lemon and cut them into thin slices" means exactly that: peel the lemon down past the white pith, then slice the flesh thin and cross-cut the slices into small pieces. Whole lemon slices with membrane intact are aggressive in a salad; use a small lemon, discard the seeds, and treat it as the acid element rather than a fruit in its own right.
- Toss the apple with lemon firstThe recipe does not say so, but cutting the apples and turning them at once with a little of the lemon flesh and its juice keeps them from browning while you finish the celery. This is the hinge of the dish: pale, crisp apple is the whole point, and a brown salad tastes fine but looks tired.
- Which applesThe recipe asks only for "juicy" apples. Choose a dense, tart-sweet variety that holds its shape when dressed, and leave the peel on if it is thin and red; the recipe pares them, but the colour is welcome.
- CeleryHalf a cup chopped is one to two ribs, depending on size. Use inner ribs and cut them small, on the scale of the thin apple slices the recipe calls for, so the salad binds rather than separating into layers.
- Mayonnaise or French dressingPeriod mayonnaise was made to order from raw yolk and oil and was less sweet than modern jarred versions. Either works here, but go sparingly: with lemon flesh already in the bowl, a heavily acidic French dressing will overwhelm the apple. Two to three tablespoons of mayonnaise is enough.
- Crisp lettuceA "small head lettuce" would most likely be a loose butterhead or similar soft head. Separate whole cup-shaped leaves, chill them until stiff, and dry them well so the dressing clings.
- YieldProbably four as a side salad, though the recipe gives no figure. Dress and serve immediately; it will not hold well, as the celery weeps and the apple softens.
Salads of apple, celery and a creamy dressing were common in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward, the family to which Waldorf salad belongs, and the reason they crowd the winter pages is straightforward: apples and celery were among the few crisp things a northern household could reliably put on the table in January. Celery had by then shifted from an expensive novelty served upright in cut-glass vases towards an everyday ingredient. The lemon here is doing double duty as seasoning and as a check on the apple browning.