Shrimp Salad
One can of shrimps, the heart leaves of four small heads of lettuce, mayonnaise dressing, French dressing.
Rinse the shrimps in ice water, drain and macerate them with a French dressing, let them stand in the ice-chest for two hours. Arrange the leaves of lettuce in the form of shells on the salad dish. Mix half the mayonnaise with the shrimp, and put a spoonful of the mixture into each shell. Drop into each shell, also, a teaspoonful of the remaining dressing; and serve the salad at once.
Tomato Baskets for Salads.
Tomatoes, parsley, sweetbreads or halibut or cucumbers, mayonnaise or French dressing.
Select firm, round tomatoes of about the same size, peel them and cut a slice from the stem end, then with a small spoon scrape out nearly all the inside pulp. A handle may be made by sticking a stalk of parsley of the right length into the opposite sides of the basket. This is a pretty case in which to serve a salad of sweetbreads or halibut with mayonnaisedressing, or cucumbers with French dressing.
Two related ideas run together here: a shrimp salad served in lettuce cups, and hollowed tomatoes used as containers for other salads. Both belong to the era of the composed luncheon salad, where presentation carried most of the work.
- The hinge: dress the shrimp cold and earlyThe two-hour rest in French dressing is what makes this more than shrimp under mayonnaise, since canned shrimp is bland and slightly saline and needs the acid to wake it up. Do not skip it or shorten it much, but do not go far past two hours either or the vinegar begins to make the flesh chalky.
- Canned shrimp then and nowPeriod tins were typically sold as nominal one-pound cans, though the drained meat was considerably less than that; modern cans are usually 4 to 6 oz. Plan on two or three cans, or substitute about 12 oz of cooked small shrimp, which is closer in texture to the original than today's brine-packed tins.
- Rinse it properlyThe ice-water rinse is there to strip the metallic, tinny note from the packing liquid. Rinse, drain well, and pat dry, since water left clinging will thin the mayonnaise into a puddle in the lettuce.
- "Macerate"In nineteenth-century cookery this simply means to steep or marinate. No mashing or bruising is intended.
- Ice-chestThe refrigerator, at 40F or below. An ice-chest ran warmer and damper than a modern fridge, so if anything you have better conditions than the author did.
- Heart leaves of four small headsThe pale, cupped inner leaves. Butterhead or Little Gem give the natural shell shape the recipe wants; iceberg hearts work but need trimming to sit flat. Four small heads yields something like eight to twelve serviceable cups.
- Two dressings, not oneHalf the mayonnaise binds the shrimp; the teaspoonful dropped into each shell is the remaining mayonnaise, not the French dressing. Read the sentence twice, since the pronoun is loose.
- Yield and timingRoughly six servings as a first course, two cups apiece. Assemble at the last minute as instructed, or the lettuce wilts and weeps.
- The tomato basketsSweetbreads here are the veal glands (thymus, sometimes pancreas), poached and cooled, and now a special-order item; poached halibut or cucumber is the easier route. Salt the scraped-out tomato shells and drain them upside down for ten minutes before filling, or the dressing dilutes.
Shrimp salad from a tin was a modern convenience when this book was written. Gulf Coast canneries were shipping shrimp inland in quantity by the 1880s and 1890s, and for cooks far from salt water a can was the only practical access to shellfish, which is why so many collections of this period specify "one can of shrimps" without apology. The rest of the recipe is pure late-Victorian table display: the salad is not tossed in a bowl but portioned into individual lettuce shells, and the tomato baskets with their parsley-stalk handles carry the same impulse to the point of parody. Sweetbreads appearing alongside halibut and cucumber is a useful marker of the period too, since they were then a fashionable luncheon delicacy.