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Apple and English Walnut Salad
Two cupfuls of sliced apple, two cupfuls of sliced English walnuts, mayonnaise dressing, lettuce.
Mix the apple and walnuts together. Arrange in a salad bowl with lettuce leaves, and cover with the mayonnaise dressing.
A three-ingredient salad from the era when mayonnaise on fruit was the height of refinement. The only real decisions are the ratio and keeping the apple from browning.
- English walnutsThe Persian walnut sold everywhere today as simply "walnuts." The qualifier distinguished them from American black walnuts, which are stronger, oilier and harder to shell, and would overwhelm the apple here.
- "Sliced" walnutsWalnuts are awkward to slice, and the direction probably means broken halves or coarsely cut pieces rather than a fine chop. Break them by hand into rough thirds so they stay recognisable against the apple.
- The ratioEqual volumes of apple and nuts is far heavier than most modern palates want, and two cupfuls of walnuts runs to about 7 oz. Half a cup to one cup of nuts against two cups of apple gives a salad you can eat a full portion of.
- Keep the apple paleCut the apple last and toss the slices with lemon juice before they meet the nuts. Cut surfaces brown within minutes, and the mayonnaise will not hide it.
- Choice of appleA firm, tart-sweet variety holds its shape and cuts the dressing: Granny Smith, Braeburn, Honeycrisp. Mealy baking apples collapse into the mayonnaise.
- The dressing"Mayonnaise dressing" in books of this period usually meant a made-from-scratch emulsion, sometimes thinned with cream or lemon. Jarred mayonnaise is stiffer and sweeter; loosen it with a spoonful of cream and a squeeze of lemon before dressing the fruit.
- AssemblyDress the apple and nuts in a bowl and then spoon them onto the lettuce, rather than pouring dressing over the finished arrangement. Otherwise the leaves take most of it and the fruit stays bare.
- YieldFour to six side servings as written, and it does not keep; dressed apple weeps within an hour or two.
Fruit-and-nut salads bound with mayonnaise were a fashion of the 1890s and 1900s, and the type is generally traced to the Waldorf salad served at New York's Waldorf Hotel, which in its earliest published form was nothing but apple, celery and mayonnaise, with walnuts arriving later. This version drops the celery and doubles down on the nuts, which was typical of the small salad collections that proliferated in the period: the salad course had recently become respectable in American middle-class dining, and cookbooks sold on sheer variety, running the same handful of ingredients through every possible permutation. The insistence on English walnuts is a marker of its own moment, when the milder nut had to be specified against the native black walnut.