Home › Salad Dressings › Easter Salad, No. 2
Easter Salad, No. 2
Arrange flat nests of shredded lettuce on individual plates. Cut a five-cent Neufchatel cheese in three pieces; roll each piece into a ball and flatten to resemble the white of a poached egg, having the cheese about one-fourth an inch in thickness.
These may be shaped upon a plate and then removed carefully with a spatula to the nests of lettuce. With pastry bag and plain tube put a mound of mayonnaise on the centre of each cake of cheese, to represent the yolk of an egg. Serve thoroughly chilled. A dash of pepper (paprica preferred) may decorate the top of the dressing.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, so success rests entirely on the texture of the cheese and the stiffness of the dressing. Two clarifications make it workable in a modern kitchen.
- "A five-cent Neufchatel cheese"American Neufchâtel was sold in small foil-wrapped cakes at this price; the weight is not stated in the recipe and period cakes seem to have run in the region of a few ounces. A 3 oz package, or a third of an 8 oz block, divides into three balls of workable size.
- Neufchâtel is not the French cheeseThe American product is a soft, mild fresh cheese made on the cream-cheese model, slightly lower in fat and moister than cream cheese. Modern supermarket Neufchâtel (often labelled "1/3 less fat cream cheese") is the direct descendant; the French AOC Neufchâtel, a bloomy-rind cheese, will not shape or taste right here.
- The hinge: cheese temperatureWork the cheese at cool room temperature so it rolls smooth without cracking, then chill the flattened discs firm before moving them. Straight from the refrigerator it crumbles at the edges; too warm and it slumps out of its round on the lettuce.
- Shaping and transferFlatten on a plate lined with parchment or waxed paper rather than bare china, and the discs lift off cleanly with an offset spatula. A quarter inch is the intended thickness; the width follows from however much cheese each of the three portions gives you.
- The mayonnaise "yolk"It must be stiff enough to hold a domed mound. A thick homemade mayonnaise or a full-fat commercial one piped with a plain round tip works; a thin or "light" dressing spreads and ruins the illusion. A small spoon and the back of a teaspoon will do if you have no bag.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseNothing here is cooked. If you make the dressing from scratch, use pasteurized shell eggs, and keep the plates refrigerated until serving, as the recipe's insistence on "thoroughly chilled" implies.
- "Paprica"The period spelling of paprika, which at the time generally meant a mild, sweet pepper used for colour more than heat. A pinch of sweet paprika reads as intended; smoked or hot varieties change the dish.
- YieldThree plates per cake of cheese, one "egg" each, as a first-course or luncheon salad. Scale by the number of guests rather than by weight.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties, published in Boston at the turn of the twentieth century, and it is a small monument to a fashion of that moment: the trompe-l'oeil salad. Cookery-school teachers and the magazines they wrote for delighted in food made to look like other food, and the poached egg on a nest of greens was a favourite conceit for Easter, when eggs carried the seasonal symbolism and lettuce stood in for the first spring growth. The pastry bag, then still a fairly genteel piece of equipment, does the decorative work. That the cheese is identified by price rather than weight is characteristic of the period, when a "five-cent cake" of Neufchâtel was a familiar unit of grocery shopping; American Neufchâtel was by then made in New York State dairies on the pattern of the French name but as a cream-cheese type of product, and it appears in these books wherever a soft, cheap, biddable fresh cheese was wanted.