Bread Salad
One stale loaf of bread, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, parsley, French dressing.
Cut the bread into pieces half an inch square; chop equal parts of cold boiled potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers; season with a little grated onion and chopped parsley. Macerate with a French dressing, and mix with the bread; let it stand for half an hour before serving.
A thrift salad that lives or dies by the bread: it must be dry enough to drink the dressing without collapsing. Everything else is a matter of proportion and a half-hour rest.
- The hinge: genuinely stale breadA close-crumbed white loaf a day or two old, or a country loaf, cut into half-inch cubes. Soft supermarket sandwich bread turns to paste; if that is all you have, dry the cubes in a 300F oven for 10 minutes and cool them before dressing.
- "Macerate" here just means marinateToss the chopped vegetables with the dressing and leave them to sit and give up some juice before the bread goes in. The vegetable liquid is part of the moisture the bread absorbs.
- French dressing, 1900 senseFrench dressing, older sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled kind. It means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. Figure on about 1/2 cup total for a loaf's worth of bread and three cups of chopped vegetables.
- Equal parts, by volumeAbout a cup each of cold boiled potato, tomato and cucumber is a sensible reading for one small loaf. Waxy potatoes hold their edges; floury ones break down into the dressing.
- Grated onionA teaspoon or two of onion grated on the fine side of a box grater, juice included. It is meant to season rather than to be tasted as onion, so raw sliced onion is a different dish.
- Salt the cucumber and tomatoSalt the chopped cucumber and tomato for ten minutes and drain off what they release, then dress. Otherwise the salad floods in the bowl and the bread goes to mush.
- The half hour matters, and so does its endThirty minutes is long enough for the bread to soften through and short enough that it still has structure. Past an hour or two the cubes disintegrate; assemble close to the meal and serve at room temperature, not chilled.
- YieldAs written this makes a large bowl, six to eight side servings. The recipe scales down cleanly on half a loaf.
Bread salads are one of the oldest answers to the problem of a loaf going hard, and versions turn up wherever bread is baked in big rounds and eaten over several days: Tuscan panzanella, Levantine fattoush with its fried flatbread, and this plainer Anglo-American cousin built on cold boiled potato and a shaken French dressing. Its presence here reflects the salad boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American and British household writers were suddenly publishing whole books of nothing but salads, encouraged by a fashion for cold luncheon dishes. The recipe's real subject is economy, of a household kind that assumed leftover boiled potatoes and a stale loaf were both on hand as a matter of course.