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Apple and Onion Salad
Three mildly acid apples, one onion, lettuce, French dressing. Slice the onion and apples. Arrange in nests of lettuce leaves, and season with the French dressing.
A two-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the onion. The original assumes you know how thin "slice" means.
- Mildly acid applesThis means a firm eating apple with some tartness, not a cooking apple: Braeburn, Jonagold, Cortland or a mild Granny Smith. Avoid soft mealy varieties, which collapse once dressed.
- Slice thin, and slice the onion thinnestA raw onion cut in rounds any thicker than about 1/8 inch will dominate the plate. Use a sweet or red onion, shave it on a mandoline or with a sharp knife, and consider soaking the slices in cold water for ten minutes to draw off the harshness.
- Leave the peel onPeeling -- The recipe does not say whether to peel; leaving the skin on adds colour and helps the slices hold together. Cut into the fruit at the last moment and toss with a little of the dressing, or with lemon juice, to stop it browning.
- French dressing, 1900s senseIn this period French dressing meant plain oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken to combine. It was not the sweet orange bottled product that later took the name.
- Nests of lettuceThe cup-shaped inner leaves of a head lettuce, iceberg or Boston, one per person, laid on the plate as a bowl. Chilled and dried thoroughly, or the dressing slides straight off.
- YieldThree apples and one onion will serve four as a side salad. It does not keep; dress and serve immediately.
Apple and onion together belong to the older tradition of the raw salad served as a relish rather than a course — a sharp, cold thing set beside pork, goose or cold roast beef, where the fruit does something of the work of apple sauce and the onion that of a pickle. The recipes in collections of this kind are written in a compressed, telegraphic style, ingredients listed in a single sentence and technique assumed, because the reader was expected to know what French dressing was and how to break a head of lettuce into cups. The insistence on "mildly acid" apples is the one piece of real instruction here.