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Onion Salad-Bermuda
Onions, lettuce, French dressing.
Arrange thin slices of onions in nests of lettuce on a shallow dish. Cover with a French dressing.
Three ingredients and two sentences, which means everything depends on the onion and the dressing. Both need translating.
- Bermuda onionsA Bermuda is a large, flat, mild onion, pale yellow or white, once grown for the American market on Bermuda and later in Texas. If you cannot find one, use a Vidalia, Walla Walla, or other sweet onion; a standard yellow storage onion is far too harsh sliced raw.
- How thin is thinCut on a mandoline or with a very sharp knife to about 1/16 inch, thin enough to be translucent. Thick raw slices are the difference between a salad and a dare.
- Taming the biteEven a sweet onion sharpens once cut. Soaking the slices in ice water for 10 to 15 minutes, then draining and drying them well, pulls out the sulfur compounds without cooking away the crispness.
- French dressing of the periodIn a book of this vintage French dressing means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked or shaken together, commonly around three or four parts oil to one of vinegar. Some period versions add mustard or paprika; sugar is rare. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Lettuce nestsCupped leaves from the heart of a head lettuce, iceberg or butter, hold their shape and hold the dressing. Chilled and thoroughly dried leaves matter more here than in a tossed salad, since a wet leaf will thin the dressing into a puddle on the dish.
- Dress at the tableOnion draws water quickly once salted or acidulated. Assemble the nests ahead if you like, but pour the dressing over immediately before serving or the slices will slump.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Figure one small onion and two or three lettuce cups per person and scale to the table; it wants something rich alongside it.
Raw onion salads of this sort belong to a period when a salad could be almost nothing at all, so long as it was cold, crisp and correctly dressed. The Bermuda onion in the title is a trade name as much as a botanical one: mild flat onions shipped from Bermuda to New York in the nineteenth century became a byword for sweetness, and when Texas growers took over the trade around the turn of the twentieth century they kept the name, which is one reason recipes of the era specify it. Single-vegetable salads dressed with plain oil and vinegar are common in collections of this kind, each distinguished largely by its arrangement on the plate.