Celery Salad
One pint of celery, one-half pint mayonnaise dressing, celery leaves, lettuce or cresses.
Scrape and cut the white stalks of celery into pieces a half inch long. Keep in cold water, drain, and dust lightly with salt, mix it with the dressing. Garnish with lettuce, cresses or celery leaves, and serve immediately.
A four-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the crispness of the celery and the restraint of the dressing. Two things need translating: the volume measures and the amount of mayonnaise.
- A pint of celeryMeasured cut, not whole: about 2 cups of half-inch pieces, which is roughly one large head of trimmed inner stalks. Buy a whole head and use the pale heart; the dark outer ribs are too fibrous for this.
- Half a pint of dressingOne cup of mayonnaise to two cups of celery is a heavy hand by current taste, and a hand-made dressing of the period was often thinner and sharper than the jarred product. Start with a third of a cup, thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice or cream, and add more only if the celery looks dry.
- The hinge: cold waterThe soak is not a rinse, it is the whole technique. Half an hour in ice water makes the cut stalks snap; drain them thoroughly and pat dry, because water left clinging will slacken the dressing into soup.
- Salt lateSalt draws water out of celery within minutes. Dust lightly and dress immediately; the recipe's closing serve immediately points the same way. Made an hour ahead this becomes a wet, limp bowl.
- CressesWatercress or garden cress, sold in bunches or as punnets of seedlings. Peppery leaves against sweet celery is the point of the garnish; plain lettuce is the duller of the two options given.
- Celery leavesThe pale inner leaves from the heart, not the coarse outer ones. They came free with every head, and the recipe lists them as one of its garnish options.
- YieldNo yield is given; a pint of celery would plausibly serve about four as a side salad, or six as one course among several.
Celery was still something of a status vegetable in the late nineteenth-century American household. Blanched to a pale ivory by banking soil or boards against the growing plant, it was expensive enough to be shown off in tall pressed-glass celery vases set on the table like flowers, and eaten raw with salt as a delicacy in its own right. Books such as this one belong to what is often described as the late-century vogue for salads, when a fashion for cold luncheon dishes pushed dozens of single-vegetable salads into print, each essentially an ingredient plus a dressing. The recipe's insistence on the white stalks alone is a reminder of what a cook was paying for: the green outer ribs were destined for soup and stuffing, while the blanched heart went into the salad bowl.