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Vegetable Salad
1 cup finely cut red cabbage 1 cup cold boiled red beets 1 cup cold boiled carrots 1 cup cold boiled potatoes 1 cup finely cut celery 1/2 cup pimentoes 1 head lettuce 1 cup French dressing Soak cabbage in cold water 1 hour; drain and add beets, carrots and potatoes cut into 1/4-inch slices; add celery. Mix well together, season with salt and pepper and serve on lettuce leaves. On top put strips of pimento and serve with French dressing, to which may be added one teaspoon onion juice. Some of above vegetables may be omitted or others substituted.
A composed salad of cold cooked vegetables, closer to a Russian or "salade russe" arrangement than to a modern tossed salad. Nothing here is difficult; the points that matter are about bleeding beets and about dressing the vegetables while they are still warm.
- Why the cabbage soaksAn hour in cold water crisps shredded red cabbage and leaches some of its sharpness. Fifteen to twenty minutes does most of the work if you are pressed; drain and pat dry so the dressing is not diluted.
- Keep the beets separateSliced red beets will stain the potatoes and carrots pink within minutes of mixing. Dress the beets on their own and add them last, or arrange them as a border rather than folding them through.
- Dress the vegetables warmBoiled potatoes and carrots take up vinaigrette more readily while still warm, though this recipe calls for them cold and dressed at the table. If you do dress them warm, slice them as soon as you can handle them, spoon over a little of the French dressing, then chill.
- PimentoesCanned sweet red peppers, packed whole or in strips — the mild Spanish variety, not hot. A drained jar of roasted red peppers cut into strips is the same thing; half a cup is roughly one small jar.
- French dressing of the periodIn an American book of this period this means a plain shaken vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt, pepper and often a little paprika. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the liquid. It gives sharpness without pieces of raw onion, which was the point in a salad meant to look neat.
- YieldAbout five cups of dressed vegetables — six side servings, or four as a lunch salad. It holds a day in the refrigerator, though the potatoes go mealy after that.
This is the American home-cook version of the cold cooked-vegetable salads that came out of French and Russian restaurant cooking in the nineteenth century, where diced root vegetables were bound with mayonnaise and moulded; at some point the mould was abandoned and the whole thing was piled on lettuce leaves with a shaken vinaigrette instead. The closing line hat substsubstituted — is common across ordinary household cookbooks, which were written for cooks working from whatever was left in the cellar or the icebox. Pimentoes point the same way: canned Spanish sweet peppers became cheap and widely available in the United States, and they turn up in salads, sandwich fillings and cheese spreads largely because they supplied red colour on a plate that otherwise had none.