Cheese Salad
Three hard-boiled eggs, one-and-a-half cupfuls of grated cheese, one teaspoonful of mustard, one-half saltspoonful of cayenne, one-half teaspoonful of salt, two tablespoonfuls of salad oil, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one cupful of chicken cut into dice.
Rub the yolks of the eggs until a smooth paste is formed. Add gradually the oil, stirring all the while with a fork; then add all the seasoning and the vinegar. Mix the cheese and chicken lightly with this dressing, and heap the mixture on a salad dish. Garnish with the whites of the eggs, cut in circles, and with a few white celery leaves or some sprigs of parsley. Serve with crackers.
Salsify in Salads.
Salsify, French dressing.
Cold boiled salsify makes a pleasant salad when mixed with a French dressing. It is also nice when combined in a salad with other cooked vegetables like potatoes, carrots, beans and cauliflower.
Peppers in Salad.
Peppers, French dressing.
After draining some boiled peppers and cutting them into strips, place them in a small bowl, and pour over them a French dressing. This salad may be served with crackers as a course in a dinner, or be served with hot or cold meats.
A cooked-yolk dressing rather than a mayonnaise, bound with grated cheese and diced chicken. The page runs three entries together: the cheese salad proper, then two brief notes on salsify and peppers.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of cayenne is about an eighth of a teaspoon. That is a real amount of heat in a cup and a half of cheese; start at half of it if your cayenne is fresh.
- Mustard means powderA teaspoonful of mustard in a book of this date is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard; prepared mustard would add both vinegar and water and slacken the paste.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" without qualification most likely meant a firm, dry cheese of the kind then sold as plain factory or American cheese. Use a well-aged cheddar grated on the fine side of the box grater; a soft or high-moisture cheese will clump into the dressing rather than distribute.
- Building the dressingCooked yolks hold far less oil than raw ones and will not emulsify properly if you rush. Mash the three yolks with the back of a fork until genuinely smooth and free of lumps, then work the oil in a few drops at a time before adding the rest, or the paste will stay grainy.
- One-to-one oil and vinegarTwo tablespoons of each is sharper than modern taste expects. The cheese and the yolks blunt it considerably, but the recipe does not say what vinegar to use; taste before you dress and hold back some of it if yours is a strong cider or wine type.
- ChickenCold cooked chicken cut into small dice — the leftovers of a roast or boiled fowl. Breast holds its shape better than thigh in a salad that is heaped rather than tossed.
- Yield and servingNo yield is stated; a cup of chicken with a cup and a half of cheese would serve about four as a first course or light lunch, with crackers alongside as the recipe directs. Assemble close to serving; the cheese firms and the dressing stiffens under refrigeration, and the mixture is best not left standing at room temperature for more than an hour or two.
- The salsify noteSalsify, or oyster plant, is a long tan root sold at some farmers' markets and Italian grocers. Peel it under acidulated water — it browns almost instantly — and boil until tender before dressing.
- The pepper note"Boiled peppers" here most likely means sweet peppers softened in water rather than chiles, though the book does not say. Modern practice would roast and peel them for the same effect with more flavour, but drain them well either way or the French dressing will pool and separate.
Cheese turns up as a salad ingredient rather than a course after it in the small salad books that proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century, when American hostesses were expanding the salad course well beyond lettuce and cold fowl. The dressing here is the older technique: a paste of hard-boiled yolks let down with oil and vinegar, which is far more forgiving than a raw-yolk mayonnaise, since it is much less liable to break. The salsify note is a reminder of how common the root once was on American tables — it was widely grown in kitchen gardens and is generally said to have earned the name oyster plant from a faint resemblance in flavour, a comparison nineteenth-century cooks repeated more often than modern eaters would confirm. Books of this type were compiled for households cooking through leftovers with some ceremony: a cup of yesterday's chicken, heaped in a dish and garnished with egg white and celery leaf, became a course.