Daisy Salad
Eight eggs, mayonnaise or cooked dressing, lettuce.
Place on the bottom of a salad dish a layer of mayonnaise or cooked dressing, on the top arrange small crisp leaves of lettuce. Cook the eggs in water (180 degree) twenty minutes, plunge in cold water. Cut the whites of the eggs into six long petals, arrange them on the lettuce to simulate the petals of a daisy and heap the yolks which have been pressed through a strainer in the center.
A composed garnish salad rather than a tossed one, and the only real technique in it is the egg cookery. The 180°F water bath is the whole point: hot enough to set the yolk, cool enough to keep it yellow and tender.
- The 180°F bathHold the water at 180F (just below a simmer, with barely a wisp of movement) for the full twenty minutes rather than boiling. Boiled eggs at this length would give a chalky yolk and a green-grey ring at the surface; this method sets them through without either.
- Plunge and peelThe cold-water plunge stops the cooking and contracts the white from the shell. Peel while still slightly warm and under running water, since you need unblemished whites for the petals.
- Cooked dressing"Cooked dressing" here means boiled dressing, a period alternative to mayonnaise thickened with egg and flour or cornstarch and sharpened with vinegar and mustard. It is typically thicker and sharper than mayonnaise, which is likely why it is offered as an equal option for a base layer meant to sit still.
- Cutting the petalsHalve each white lengthwise, then cut each half into three long wedges from a common point. A thin, wet knife blade prevents tearing. Eight eggs give forty-eight petals, enough for one large daisy or several small ones.
- The yolksPress the yolks through a fine sieve directly over the center and do not pack them down. The point is a loose, fluffy mound; pressing collapses it into paste.
- Assembly orderSpread the dressing first, lay the lettuce over it, then set the petals, as the recipe directs. Building on dressing rather than serving it alongside keeps the arrangement from sliding, but lettuce sitting directly on dressing will wilt, so the salad is meant to be assembled shortly before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; eight eggs would plausibly serve a small table as a first course or luncheon salad. The original seasons nothing, so salt on the yolks is a modern addition if you want one.
Salads of this kind are generally traced to the first decades of the twentieth century, when American cookbooks devoted whole volumes to the subject and the measure of a good salad was as much how it looked on the plate as how it tasted. Hard-cooked eggs, cut into petals and radiating from a sieved yolk center, were a standard trick of the period. The care over the 180-degree water is worth noticing: the low-temperature method for hard-cooking eggs was widely taught in the domestic-science schools of the era, which pressed the point that boiling toughens egg protein, and the instruction survives here as a bare parenthesis a modern reader could easily skip past. The choice offered between mayonnaise and a cooked dressing is also of its time, boiled dressing being often said to have been the cheaper option in kitchens without a reliable supply of good oil.