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Salad
2 HARD-COOKED EGGS, CHOPPED FINE 6 STALKS CHIVES, CUT FINE 12 TARRAGON LEAVES, CHOPPED FINE Pour on 1/2 bottle or 1 cup of mayonnaise. Mix thoroughly. Spring Garden Salad: The first fruits of the gardenyoung lettuce leaves, corn-salad, spinach leaves, beet tops, tips of broccoli and of fennel, radishes, young onions, baby carrots, nasturtium leaves, young pea pods, and minced parsley-use in any combination, the leaves pulled to pieces and the vegetables cut up. Put in a garlic-rubbed wooden bowl and mix well with a French dressing which has been sweetened with a little honey, wild or tame. GARLIC
Two salads sit side by side here: an egg-and-herb dressing bound with mayonnaise, and a raw spring vegetable salad dressed with sweetened vinaigrette. Both assume a garden rather than a shopping list.
- "1/2 bottle or 1 cup of mayonnaise"The equivalence implies a bottle of about a pint, the two measures offered as alternatives. A cup of mayonnaise to two chopped eggs and a handful of herbs gives a thick sauce, closer to a dip or a dressing for a composed salad than a pourable one; thin it with a spoonful of vinegar or cream if you want it to coat leaves.
- Corn-saladThis is mache, or lamb's lettuce, sold in small rosettes. It bruises easily and should be added last.
- Nasturtium leaves and pea podsBoth are edible and both are peppery or sweet only while very young. Full-grown nasturtium leaves turn coarse and hot, and pea pods past the flat stage go fibrous; use the smallest you can find.
- TarragonTwelve leaves is a modest amount, roughly a teaspoon chopped. French tarragon is the one meant; Russian tarragon has almost no anise flavour and Mexican tarragon is a marigold.
- The garlic-rubbed bowlCut a clove and rub the inside of a dry wooden bowl with the cut face, then discard the clove. It leaves a trace of garlic oil rather than a flavour anyone can name, and it is the whole point of the technique.
- Honey in the dressing"Wild or tame" appears to distinguish gathered honey from an apiary's. Use no more than a teaspoon per half cup of dressing; a light hand keeps the sweetening from being tasted on its own.
- Dress at the last momentEverything in the spring salad is raw and thin-leaved. Acid collapses spinach and beet tops within a few minutes, so mix in the bowl just before the salad goes to the table.
- YieldThe egg-and-herb mixture as given makes about a cup and a quarter, enough to dress a salad for six or to fill a dozen small sandwiches. The garden salad is open-ended: allow a generous double handful of leaves per person.
Both of these belong to a strain of cookery that treated the kitchen garden as the menu. Corn-salad, beet tops, fennel tips and nasturtium leaves were common garden produce in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became scarce in markets before returning as "mesclun" and "micro-greens" decades later. The garlic-rubbed wooden bowl and the sweetened French dressing are both associated with the mid-century American salad manner. The reference to a bottle of mayonnaise suggests a date after commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the 1910s.