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Cooked Vegetable Salad (Dress cooked kidney beans peas)
Dress cooked kidney beans, peas, and balls cut from potatoes, each separately with French dressing, to which a few drops of onion juice have been added. Dispose upon a serving-dish and let stand in a cool place an hour or more. Garnish at serving with heart leaves of lettuce.
A composed vegetable salad in the late-Victorian manner, where each element is dressed on its own and only assembled at the end. Two details carry the dish: the meaning of "French dressing" in 1900, and dressing the vegetables while they are still warm.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn this period the term denotes oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in the United States.
- Onion juiceGrate a halved onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate on a rasp and squeeze in a cloth. A few drops is literal — it should register as savour, not as onion.
- Dress the vegetables warmDressing while warm -- The recipe says only that the vegetables are cooked and gives no direction about temperature. Beans and potatoes do take up dressing more readily while still holding heat, so draining and dressing at once before chilling is a reasonable reading, but it is an editorial suggestion rather than something the original specifies.
- Kidney beansDried beans soaked and simmered until tender are the likeliest reading, though canned beans were also available by 1900 and the recipe does not say. Drained and rinsed canned beans work; about two 15-oz cans give roughly the yield of a half-pound of dried.
- Potato ballsCut with a melon baller from raw waxy potatoes, then boil or steam just until a skewer goes in cleanly, about 8 to 10 minutes. Mealy baking potatoes break apart in the dressing.
- PeasFresh shelled peas cooked briefly, or frozen peas blanched two minutes and drained. Canned peas, the likelier 1900 option in winter, are too soft to hold their shape against the other two.
- Dress separately, then arrangeThe point of the separate dressing is that each vegetable keeps its own colour and seasoning. Pile them in bands or heaps on the dish rather than tossing them together.
- Standing timeThe recipe asks for an hour or more in a cool place, and an hour in the refrigerator answers it. On long standing the vinegar will eventually dull the green of the peas.
- YieldEqual volumes of the three vegetables, about two cups each, serve six as a side salad.
This belongs to the tradition of the *salade russe* and its many composed relatives, which arrived in American cookbooks from French professional practice in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and were prized for looking deliberate on a platter. Janet McKenzie Hill, who edited the *Boston Cooking School Magazine*, wrote this collection at a moment when salads were moving from a plain dish of greens toward arranged, chilled compositions suitable for luncheon and supper tables. The habit of dressing each vegetable separately reflects a cooking-school concern with distinctness and neatness rather than any older folk practice; so does the garnish of lettuce hearts. Potato balls cut with a scoop belong to the same impulse toward neat, uniform shapes, and the small quantity of onion juice suggests raw onion rather than letting it be tasted outright.