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Green-and-White Salad
Cut cooked chicken or sweetbreads in half-inch cubes; remove the skin and seeds from white grapes, and cut each grape in halves; cut tender blanched celery stalks in small pieces. Take equal portions of celery and meat and half as much of seeded grapes. Mix with French dressing; the meat should stand in the dressing an hour or more, when ready to serve. Serve in nests of lettuce.
Dispose a little white mayonnaise or cream dressing on each nest. Garnish with halves of blanched pistachio nuts.
A composed salad of the sort that filled ladies' luncheon menus around 1900. Nothing here is difficult; most of the work is in the wording.
- Blanched celeryThis means the pale inner stalks, blanched in the garden by banking soil or paper around the plant, not celery dipped in boiling water. Use the tender heart of a head of celery and save the dark outer ribs for stock.
- Blanched pistachiosPistachios with the papery skin slipped off so the green shows clean. Cover shelled nuts with boiling water for a minute, drain, and rub the skins away; they are the only colour in the dish, so it matters.
- GrapesSeeding and skinning was necessary because table grapes of the period had tough skins and hard pips. Green seedless grapes need only halving, though skinning still gives the softer texture the recipe is after.
- SweetbreadsIf you use them rather than chicken, they need the classic preparation first: soak in cold water, then simmer gently until firm, cool under a weight, and peel away membrane and gristle before cubing. Untrimmed sweetbreads are unpleasantly chewy.
- White mayonnaise or cream dressing"White" mayonnaise means a deliberately pale mayonnaise, often lightened with whipped cream; a cream dressing is a boiled or cream-based dressing. Either way, keep it light in colour, since the whole point of the salad is that it is green and white.
- The marinating hourAn hour in French dressing seasons the meat right through, which is what makes the salad taste of something. Dress the celery and grapes only at the last minute or they weep and go limp.
- Proportions and yieldEqual volumes of celery and meat, half as much grape. Roughly two cups each of chicken and celery with one cup of grapes serves four as a luncheon course.
- Assembly"Nests of lettuce" are cupped leaves from the heart of a head of butter or iceberg lettuce, one per plate, filled and then spooned with the pale dressing. Chill the plates; the salad is meant to be served cold.
Chicken with celery, bound in dressing and served in a lettuce cup, was a common luncheon salad of the American 1890s and 1900s, and cookbooks of the period often varied it: grapes, nuts, apple, pineapple. The colour-scheme title is the giveaway that this book belongs to the era of the ladies' luncheon, when a table might be planned around a single shade and a hostess was expected to garnish accordingly. Sweetbreads appear as an equal alternative to chicken, their mild flavour and pale colour suiting the scheme exactly. The pistachios are a small extravagance of the same kind, valued less for taste than for the green they provide.