Apple Salad
Arrange peeled and sliced apples on crisp cress or lettuce leaves, and serve with French dressing made with lemon juice or wine; or mayonnaise made without mustard, adding whipped cream if desired. Ф Ф
A pamphlet-style recipe that assumes you already know how to make French dressing and mayonnaise, and gives no quantities at all. The decisions it leaves to you are the whole dish.
- The hinge: keep the apples from browningPeeled and sliced apples oxidize within minutes, and the original says nothing about it. Slice directly into the lemon juice you will use for the dressing, or toss the slices in lemon juice as you go, then arrange.
- French dressing, as this book means itFrench dressing, as this period means it -- In American books of this period, French dressing is broadly around three parts oil to one part acid, with salt and a little pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. Here the acid is lemon juice or wine rather than vinegar, both of which are gentler against sweet fruit.
- Why no mustardMustard is a common seasoning in mayonnaise and helps stabilise the emulsion, though the egg yolk does the emulsifying; its heat can fight raw apple. Leaving it out gives a blander, softer mayonnaise that may need a little more lemon and salt to stay interesting.
- Mayonnaise with whipped creamFolding softly whipped unsweetened cream into mayonnaise was a common treatment for fruit salads and appears under various names in period books; proportions vary, so add it to taste. Fold it in just before serving; it slackens and weeps if it stands.
- Raw eggHomemade mayonnaise is uncooked. If serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immunocompromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- Cress"Cress" here most likely means garden cress or watercress, peppery and quite different from a lettuce leaf. Watercress against sweet apple and a lemon dressing is the more interesting of the two options.
- Apple choiceA firm, tart-sweet apple holds its shape and its acidity; a soft mealy variety collapses under dressing. Leave the skin on a red-skinned apple if you want colour, despite the instruction to peel.
- Yield and servingReckon roughly one medium apple per person as a first course or side salad. Assemble and dress at the table or immediately before it goes out, since dressed apple slices soften quickly.
The apple salad sits in a long line of fruit-and-greens combinations that spread through American cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Waldorf and its many imitators made raw apple respectable on the dinner table. The instruction to omit mustard and to lighten mayonnaise with whipped cream is characteristic of the era's fruit-salad convention, which favoured mild, pale, faintly sweet dressings over anything sharp. Note also what is absent: no quantities, no timings, no yield. These pamphlets were written for cooks who already knew the two dressings by heart and needed only the idea.