Apple Salad
Use equal parts of tart apples, peeled, cored and sliced, cut celery and chopped nut meats. English walnuts preferred. Use any good salad dressing and mix just before serving.
A three-ingredient salad of the Waldorf type, written for cooks who already knew how to make a boiled or mayonnaise dressing. The only real decisions are the apple and the timing.
- Proportions"Equal parts" is most easily read as by volume. Two cups each of diced apple, celery and walnuts gives about six side servings; that is a generous amount of nut for modern taste, and the nuts can be cut back to half or a third.
- "Sliced" applesSlices are hard to eat with a fork in a dressed salad; dice to roughly the size of the cut celery so the three elements bind together. Tart is right: Granny Smith, Braeburn, or a firm russet.
- BrowningCut apples oxidise within minutes. Toss the dice in lemon juice as you go, or hold them in lightly acidulated water and drain well before dressing.
- "English walnuts"The ordinary walnut of the supermarket, as against the black walnut then common in American yards, which is stronger and slightly resinous and would dominate the apple; that may be why the preference is stated, though the book does not say.
- Toast the nutsTen minutes at 350F, cooled completely, sharpens the flavour and keeps the pieces from going soft in the dressing. Not in the original, but it is what makes the difference.
- "Any good salad dressing"In a kitchen of this period this would have meant mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg and vinegar rather than a bottled dressing. Mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream and a squeeze of lemon is closest to the intent.
- Mix just before servingThis is the hinge. Celery weeps and apple goes limp under salt and acid, and a salad dressed well ahead turns watery. Prepare the components, chill them separately, combine at the last moment.
- ServingTraditionally on crisp lettuce leaves on individual plates, which also keeps any released liquid off the salad itself.
Apple, celery and nuts with mayonnaise is the formula generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s — the hotel's original version is usually said to have been apple and celery alone, with walnuts added by later cooks and later cookbooks. By the time community and "reliable recipe" collections like this one were being compiled, the combination had spread far beyond hotel dining rooms, and celery in particular was a fashionable, faintly luxurious vegetable often set out on the table in a special glass. The terseness here is typical of the genre — the writer assumes you have a dressing recipe elsewhere in the book and needs only to tell you the ratio and the one warning that matters.