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Fish Salads (Cold water cover with boiling)
in cold water, cover with boiling water, and let simmer five or six minutes. Rinse again in cold water, drain, and when cold cut into slices. Cut white stalks of celery into small pieces. Mix the celery and scallops - half as much celery as scallops-with mayonnaise or boiled dressing, and shape in a mound. Mask the mound with a thin coating of mayonnaise. With large-sized capers outline a design on each of the four sides of the mound, fill these with whites of eggs, cooked and chopped fine. Ornament with figures cut from slices of boiled beets. Fill in the spaces around the designs with capers, and garnish with green celery leaves and white stalks of celery, fringed.
The page begins mid-sentence: the missing opening instructed the cook to wash the scallops in cold water. What follows is a moulded scallop-and-celery salad, more an exercise in cold-buffet decoration than in cookery.
- The scallopsFive or six minutes at a simmer will make modern sea scallops tough and squeaky. Scallops are done when they turn opaque, which takes about a minute or two in barely trembling water; small bay scallops need less. Pull them the moment they lose their translucency and chill at once.
- "Boiled dressing"Not a boiled mayonnaise but a cooked dressing thickened with egg yolk and flour or cornstarch, sharpened with vinegar and mustard and thinned with milk or cream. It was the everyday alternative to mayonnaise in American cookbooks of this period, cheaper in oil and more stable in a warm room.
- ProportionsHalf as much celery as scallops. The recipe does not say whether by volume or by weight; the cut pieces are most easily judged by volume. The recipe specifies white stalks, i.e. the pale inner ribs, which are less stringy raw.
- MaskingTo mask is to coat the surface with a thin, even layer of mayonnaise so the mound reads as a smooth white ground for the decoration. Thin the mayonnaise slightly with cream or a spoonful of the dressing so it flows rather than sits in ridges, and chill the mound firm before you coat it.
- Capers"Large-sized" presumably points to the larger commercial grades, such as capucines, capotes or grusas, which are considerably bigger than the nonpareils that dominate supermarket shelves. Rinse and dry them well or they will bleed brine into the mayonnaise coating.
- BeetsBoiled beets, sliced thin and cut into small figures; period kitchens used aspic or vegetable cutters for shapes of this kind. Blot them dry on a towel before laying them down, or the colour will run across the white surface.
- Fringed celeryA standard garnish of the period: a short length of stalk slit repeatedly at one end with a knife, then dropped into ice water so the strips curl back.
- Yield and timingNo quantities are given. A mound built on about a pound of scallops with half its volume in celery would serve roughly four to six as a first course. Assemble it shortly before serving and keep it refrigerated; the decoration will not survive being made the day before.
Moulded and masked salads of this kind belong to the turn-of-the-century American table, where a salad was judged as much by its architecture as by its flavour. The technique is generally traced to French garde-manger work by way of the cooking-school movement, and the vocabulary here belongs to that world: mask — from masquer — along with ornament and fringed. Scallops suited the form because they cook white, cut into neat rounds and hold their shape when bound in dressing. The choice of capers, chopped egg white and beet cut into figures reflects a colour scheme more than a palate, and two dressings are offered, mayonnaise or boiled.