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Vegetables Salads
1-1 c. carrots diced, 1/2 c. potato diced, 1/2 c. turnip diced, 1/2 sweet potato diced, 1 c. string beans; French dressing. 2-Carrots, cauliflower, beets; French dressing. 3-Carrots, beets, string beans, peas; French dressing. 4-2 c. diced potato, 1/2 c. diced cucumber; 1/2 c. diced radish, 1/4 c. grated onion; French or boiled dressing. 5-4 parts diced tomatoes, 1 part diced celery; French dressing. 6-1 c. diced cucumber, 1 c. diced celery; 1 c. diced radish, 1/4 c. grated onion; lettuce and boiled dressing. `7-2 c. kidney beans, 1/2 c. diced celery, 1 shredded green pepper; French dressing and lettuce. 8-Tomatoes, peeled and centers removed. Fill cavities with crumbled cheese of any variety. 9-Green peppers; remove slice from stem and all seeds; parboil and chill. Fill with chopped cabbage, cabbage and celery, cabbage and apple; fill with cream cheese. When firm cut in 1/4 inch slices and serve on lettuce with French or boiled dressing.
This is a list of nine salad combinations rather than a single recipe, written for a cook who already knows how to boil a carrot and shake up a dressing. The gaps worth filling are the cooking of the vegetables, which is never mentioned, and the two dressings the list keeps referring to.
- The root vegetables must be cooked firstCarrots, potato, turnip, sweet potato, beets, string beans and peas in combinations 1, 2, 3 and 4 are all assumed to be already cooked and cooled — boiled or steamed until just tender, then drained and chilled. Dice after cooking rather than before so the pieces hold their edges.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot a sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, beaten or shaken to combine just before use. Period formulas vary, from roughly two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. Dress warm-ish vegetables lightly and let them sit twenty minutes; they absorb far more than raw greens.
- Boiled dressingThe cooked, custard-like dressing common in American church and community cookbooks — egg, vinegar, a little flour or mustard and sometimes milk, thickened over water and cooled. Thick mayonnaise is the closest substitute if you are not making one. The book calls for it alone only in No. 6, and elsewhere offers it as an alternative to French dressing.
- Kidney beans in No. 7Two cups means cooked beans: a drained 15-oz can gives roughly 1½ cups, so you need about a can and a half, or about 3/4 cup dried beans soaked and simmered until tender. Rinse canned beans well or the packing liquid muddies the dressing.
- Grated onionA quarter cup of onion grated on a box grater releases a great deal of juice and is much sharper than the same volume chopped. Grate over the bowl so the juice goes in, and taste before adding all of it.
- Parboiling the peppers in No. 9Two to three minutes in boiling water, then straight into ice water. Any longer and the shells collapse when you stuff and slice them.
- "When firm, cut in 1/4 inch slices"No. 9 is a stuffed-pepper roll: pack the filling in tightly with no air pockets, wrap the whole pepper and refrigerate at least four hours, ideally overnight, then slice crosswise into rings. Cream cheese sets firmer than a cabbage-and-apple filling, which will want a longer chill.
- Cheese in No. 8The recipe says 'crumbled cheese of any variety', so the choice is open; the word crumbled points towards a dry cheese or cottage cheese rather than a soft ripened one. Salt the hollowed tomatoes and drain them upside down for ten minutes first, or the filling turns watery.
- YieldWhere quantities are given (Nos. 1, 4, 5, 6, 7), each combination makes roughly four modest side servings; Nos. 2 and 3 give no amounts, and Nos. 8 and 9 are counted by the piece — one tomato or one pepper's worth of slices per person.
The Philathea Cook Book belongs to the enormous class of American fundraising cookbooks compiled by church and Sunday-school groups — Philathea classes were Bible classes for young women, the counterpart to the Baraca classes for young men in the interdenominational Baraca-Philathea movement begun in the 1890s. Pages like this one show how the community cookbook worked: rather than nine separate recipes each with its own headnote, a contributor sets down a bare table of proportions and trusts the reader to supply the technique. The combinations themselves reflect a moment when the vegetable salad had recently become respectable in middle-class American cooking, helped along by domestic-science teaching and by the year-round availability of canned peas, beans and tomatoes. The stuffed green pepper chilled with cream cheese and sliced into rings, No. 9 here, was a genuine fashion of the 1910s and 1920s and turns up in other contemporary collections, usually credited to no one in particular.