Home › Salad Dressings › Celery-and-Chestnut Salad
Celery-and-Chestnut Salad
Shell and blanch the chestnuts; then boil about fifteen minutes, or until tender; drain and cool.
When cool cut into quarters, add an equal quantity of fine-sliced celery, dress with French dressing, and serve on lettuce leaves. Sliced pimentos may be added.
Apple,-Celery-and-English-Walnut Salad.
Peel and cut the apples in small cubes; blanch the nuts and break in pieces, and cut the celery in thin slices; marinate the apple and nuts with oil and lemon juice half an hour; drain, add the celery and mayonnaise dressing, and serve in cups made by removing the pulp from red apples. Cut the edges of the apples in small vandykes; keep fresh in cold water until ready to serve.
Two related winter salads from an era when chestnuts were a bulk grocery item and celery was a prized late-season vegetable. The work is all in the preparation; the dressings are assembled at the last minute.
- Blanching chestnutsHere "blanch" means loosening and removing the inner brown skin, not a quick dip for color. Score the flat side of each shell, cover with boiling water for a few minutes, and peel shell and pellicle together while hot; they cling stubbornly once cool. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts skip this step entirely and need only a few minutes of simmering.
- Fifteen minutes is a guide, not a ruleFresh chestnuts vary widely in size and dryness. Test with a knife tip: they should be crumbly-tender like a cooked potato but still hold a quartered shape. Overcooked they turn to paste in the dressing.
- French dressing, 1900 styleThe recipe assumes the plain unemulsified dressing of the period: oil with vinegar or lemon juice, salt and pepper, shaken to order, commonly around three parts oil to one of acid though the book gives no proportions here. It separates by design, so dress the chestnuts and celery just before serving.
- PimentosSkinned and seeded sweet red peppers, whether roasted at home or bought put up in cans or jars. Jarred pimentos or roasted piquillo peppers work; drain them well so the brine does not thin the dressing.
- Blanching walnutsFor the second salad, pour boiling water over shelled walnut halves and rub off the papery skin, which carries most of the bitterness. Toasting them lightly afterward is a modern improvement and does no harm to the recipe.
- The half-hour marinadeOil and lemon juice on the apple and nuts serve double duty: they season, and the acid keeps the cut apple from browning. Drain properly before the mayonnaise goes in or the dressing will slacken and slide.
- VandykesA row of small V-shaped notches cut around the rim of the hollowed apple. The name is traditionally traced to the pointed edging seen in Van Dyck's portraits. Holding the cups in cold water, as directed, keeps the cut edges pale.
- YieldNo quantities are given, which is normal for the period. Figure about a cup of prepared chestnuts or apple cubes plus an equal volume of celery for four small salads, and dress lightly rather than generously.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties, one of a wave of turn-of-the-century American books that treated the salad course as a fashionable novelty rather than a plate of greens. Both versions here are typical of that moment: crisp celery as the structural element, a nut for richness, and a fruit or vegetable cut into decorative shapes, all presented on lettuce or in a carved apple shell. Chestnuts were still cheap and widely sold on American streets in 1900, when the native American chestnut had not yet been felled by the blight identified in New York a few years later; today's chestnuts in North American markets are almost entirely European or Asian imports. The apple-celery-walnut combination is essentially a Waldorf salad, though the salad as devised at the Waldorf was apple and celery with mayonnaise, the walnuts generally held to be a later addition.