Home › Recipes › English Walnut Salad
English Walnut Salad
One-half pound English walnuts, two apples, mayonnaise dressing, lettuce, cold boiled chicken if liked.
Shell the walnuts, throw them into boiling water and remove the skin. Mix these with two chopped apples and mayonnaise dressing and serve on lettuce leaves. Pieces of cold boiled chicken may also be mixed with the nuts before mixing with the apples and mayonnaise dressing. Pare and core the apples and cut them into dice.
A three-ingredient salad that stands or falls on the walnuts: skinned, they are sweet and buttery; left in their papery brown coats they turn the mayonnaise bitter and grey. Everything else here is assembly.
- The hinge: blanching the nutsPour boiling water over the shelled halves, let them stand two or three minutes, then rub the skins off in a towel while still hot. Dry them well before dressing, or the mayonnaise will thin and slide.
- "English walnut"The ordinary supermarket walnut, Juglans regia, called English to distinguish it from the native American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the apple. Buy shelled halves and skip the cracking.
- Half a poundHalf a pound in the shell yields somewhere around 3 to 4 oz of nutmeat, on the light side for two apples and a full dressing. The instruction to shell them suggests the weight is unshelled, but the proportions read comfortably as about 8 oz shelled, a little over 2 cups of halves.
- ApplesA firm, tart-sweet variety holds its dice; toss it with a spoonful of lemon juice as you cut, since the recipe assumes immediate serving and cut apple browns within minutes.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise dressing was made to order with raw yolks, and was often stiffer and more sharply seasoned than the jarred kind, mustard being a common addition. Commercial mayonnaise works; loosen it with a little cream or lemon so it coats rather than clumps.
- Cold boiled chickenPoached breast or leg meat, cooled and cut into dice the size of the apple. Chill it thoroughly before it meets the dressing and keep the finished salad cold until it goes to the table.
- Yield and servingRoughly four as a first course on lettuce leaves, more if the chicken is added. Dress it shortly before serving or the nuts soften.
The Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in the late 1890s, began as apple, celery and mayonnaise, with walnuts a later addition; salad had moved from a garnish to a course. Mayonnaise-bound fruit-and-nut mixtures suited that moment perfectly, since they required no cooking, could be made from pantry staples in winter, and looked substantial on a lettuce leaf. The optional cold boiled chicken is the older logic showing through, a way of turning yesterday's fowl into today's luncheon dish. Blanching walnuts to remove the skin is worth reviving, since the skin carries a bitterness.