Nut Salad
Take equal portions of English walnut, hickory nut and pecan meats, add twice as much chopped celery as nut meats, pour over all a good salad dressing and serve at once on lettuce leaves.
A three-line salad that depends almost entirely on the quality of the nuts and the dressing. A few notes on proportions and terms.
- English walnutSimply the common walnut sold everywhere today, so named to distinguish it from the American black walnut. Black walnut is far more assertive and would unbalance the mix if substituted.
- Hickory nutsRarely sold commercially now, and more often gathered than bought even when this was written. Pecans are the closest relative and the usual stand-in, so the salad becomes walnut and pecan in practice.
- Toast the nutsThe original assumes freshly cracked nuts with their own oil intact. Supermarket nut meats have often sat long enough to go flat, so a few minutes in a dry pan or a 350F oven restores them. Cool completely before mixing.
- ProportionsTwo parts chopped celery to one part nuts by volume. About a cup of nut meats to two cups of celery makes a modest bowl, taken from the inner ribs where the strings are fewer.
- "A good salad dressing"In a book of this period this would most likely mean a boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour, a mayonnaise, or a plain French dressing of oil and vinegar. A mayonnaise loosened with lemon juice suits it well; a thin vinaigrette will not cling to celery.
- Serve at onceThe instruction is the hinge. Dressed celery soon weeps and toasted nuts go soft, so mix at the table or immediately before it. Chill the components separately if you need to work ahead.
- YieldNo yield is stated; served on single lettuce leaves it reads as a side or a luncheon course rather than a main dish.
Salads of celery bound with mayonnaise were a fixture of American entertaining from the 1890s onward, given a long run of popularity by the Waldorf salad and its many imitators. The appeal was partly seasonal: celery kept well in a cool cellar through winter, and nuts kept too after the fall gathering, so a salad like this could appear on a holiday table when almost no fresh vegetable could. Hickory nuts in particular mark the recipe as regional and domestic rather than commercial awhich is why they have all but disappeared from printed recipes since.