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Apple, Chestnut and Celery Salad
One-and-a-half cupfuls each of sliced apple, celery and boiled chestnuts, cooked dressing No. 2, celery tips.
Cut the apples in thin slices. Shell and boil the chestnuts fifteen minutes or until soft but not broken. Drain and when cool cut the chestnuts and celery in slices. Moisten with a part of the dressing and put in a salad dish with the remainder of the dressing on top. Garnish with celery tips. Japanese Salad. (Mrs. Rorer.) Two potatoes, six cooked or canned mush-rooms, one teaspoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of onion juice, one-fourth teaspoonful pepper, four tablespoonfuls of white wine, twelve sardines, lettuce, parsley, French dressing.
Boil the potatoes and while hot cut into dice, add the mushrooms chopped fine. Mix, add the salt, onion juice and pepper. Sprinkle over the wine, and stand on ice. When ready to serve, add the sardines, turn into a salad bowl on white lettuce leaves.
Sprinkle over chopped parsley and cover with a French dressing.
Two salads run together on this page: the apple, chestnut and celery, and Mrs. Rorer's Japanese Salad. Both assume a household that peeled its own chestnuts and kept a cooked dressing on hand.
- The chestnuts are the hingeFresh chestnuts are easiest handled by cutting an X through the shell before cooking and peeling off the bitter inner skin while they are still hot; once cool it clings to the nut. (The recipe, note, has you shell them first and then boil.) Fifteen minutes may be optimistic for larger nuts; work to the book's own test, soft but not broken, which can take longer.
- Or skip the peelingVacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are already tender and need only a brief simmer, or nothing at all. A 1.5-cup measure of sliced chestnuts is roughly 8 oz of peeled nuts.
- Cooked dressing No. 2This refers back to another page in the same book. Boiled dressings of the period were generally egg thickened with milk or cream, with vinegar, mustard and a little sugar, cooked until it coats a spoon, though the exact formula here is not on this page. Any mild boiled dressing works; mayonnaise slackened with cream and sharpened with vinegar and mustard is the nearest quick substitute.
- Celery tipsThe pale leafy tops from the heart of the bunch, not the root end. Modern celery is sold trimmed, so buy a whole head if you want the garnish.
- Keep the apple paleSlice the apple last and toss it with lemon juice, or dress it immediately. A firm tart variety holds its shape against the soft chestnut better than a mealy one.
- YieldFour and a half cups of solids dresses four to six as a side salad.
- Onion juice, in the Japanese saladGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; one tablespoon takes about half a medium onion. Bottled onion powder is not a substitute here.
- "Stand on ice"Refrigerate, 30 minutes to an hour, so the warm potato absorbs the wine and seasoning. The sardines go in only at the end because they break up if stirred through early.
Ninety-Nine Salads belongs to the American salad boom of the early 1900s, when the composed salad moved from a side dish to something a hostess was judged on, and boiled dressings — cheaper and more stable than mayonnaise before mechanical emulsifying was routine — were often used as a binder. The apple, chestnut and celery combination is autumnal and cheap by the standards of its day: chestnuts were still a common street and market food in the eastern United States, sold by the quart, before the blight that reached New York in 1904 destroyed the American chestnut over the following decades and left the country dependent on imported nuts. The second recipe is credited to Sarah Tyson Rorer, principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School and one of the most quoted cookery authorities in America at the time. Its name is generally traced not to Japan but to the vogue for potato-and-wine salads that followed Dumas fils's play Francillon (1887), in which a character describes a "salade japonaise" of hot potatoes moistened with white wine — the label attached itself to the formula and stuck, mushrooms and sardines and all.