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Celery-And-Nut Salad
Cut fine tender stalks of celery and English walnuts and mix with French dressing. Garnish the centre of the salad and the border of the jelly with tender leaves of lettuce and bits of curled celery.
A two-sentence recipe that assumes you already know the house French dressing and, from the reference to "the jelly," that it is being served with a molded aspic from the preceding page. A few of its assumptions need spelling out.
- The missing jellyThe instruction to garnish "the border of the jelly" only makes sense in context: some jellied dish, evidently from a neighbouring page, was served with or beside this salad, though the recipe does not say what it was or how the two were arranged. Made on its own the salad is simply celery and walnuts dressed, and the second sentence can be ignored except for the lettuce.
- French dressing, 1900 versionNot the sweet orange bottled dressing the name now means in America. In this period it generally means oil and vinegar in the region of three or four to one with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken just before use and expected to separate again.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut sold today, specified to distinguish it from the stronger, oilier American black walnut. Break them into halves or coarse pieces rather than chopping fine, and taste one first: shelled walnuts turn rancid quickly and one stale nut carries through the whole bowl.
- ProportionsNone are given. Roughly two parts sliced celery to one part walnuts by volume works, with about a tablespoon of dressing per cup of salad; enough for four as a side.
- Cut fineHere this means thin slices or short lengths across the stalk, not a mince. Use the pale inner stalks; the outer ribs of modern celery are stringier than the blanched celery of the period and want peeling.
- Curled celeryA period garnish: cut short lengths of stalk, slit one or both ends into narrow fringes with a knife, and drop into ice water for half an hour until the strips curl back. It keeps a day in cold water.
- Dress at the last momentCelery gives up water fast once salted. Combine nuts, celery and dressing immediately before serving or the salad sits in a thin pool of brine and oil.
Celery was still something of a luxury vegetable in the turn-of-the-century American kitchen, sold blanched and pale, served raw in tall cut-glass vases on the table, and prized for crispness rather than flavor. Pairing it with walnuts and an oil-and-vinegar dressing sits at the head of a family of turn-of-the-century salads that eventually produced the Waldorf, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s and originally made of apple and celery alone, with nuts added later. The fashion of the day ran to cold composed salads presented as architecture: a ring of aspic, a mound of something crisp in the middle, a fringe of lettuce and curled celery around the edge. The brevity here is characteristic of the book, which expects the reader to have the French dressing recipe already in hand.