Home › Salad Dressings › Green-Pea Salad
Green-Pea Salad
Mix the peas with a cream dressing; serve in nests of lettuce; garnish the top of each nest with a little chopped beet, or a fanciful figure cut from a pickled beet or pimento.
A three-line assembly recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century salad books, where the dressing chapter carried the real instructions and the salad itself was assumed to be obvious. Two things need filling in: what the peas should be, and what "cream dressing" meant.
- Cream dressingIn period salad books this usually meant a cooked boiled dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, butter, seasoning, thinned with cream — rather than whipped cream or modern bottled mayonnaise; the book's own dressing chapter would give the exact formula. A thick mayonnaise loosened with a spoonful or two of heavy cream is the closest quick substitute; it should coat the peas without pooling.
- The peasFresh shelled peas, boiled 2-4 minutes until just tender and then plunged into ice water, keep their colour and their bite. Frozen peas need only to be thawed and briefly blanched. Canned peas were a likely default when this was written and will read as soft and grey by comparison.
- Dress cold and latePeas must be thoroughly cold and well drained before dressing, or the residual water thins the dressing and it slides off into the lettuce. Dress no more than half an hour before serving.
- Nests of lettuceWhole cupped inner leaves of butterhead or iceberg, one or two per serving, arranged to hold a mound of peas. Wash and dry them completely — a wet leaf ruins the dressing as surely as wet peas do.
- Pickled beet and pimentoPimento came in small cans and was a common red garnish; drained jarred roasted red pepper does the same job. Cut shapes with a small aspic cutter or a paring knife. Add beet at the last moment, since it bleeds pink into a cream dressing.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. Roughly 3 cups of cooked peas with about 1/2 cup of dressing fills six lettuce nests as a side salad.
Salad books of this period often gave more space to dressings than to the salads themselves, which is one reason a recipe this short can be so bare — the reader was expected to have the dressing recipe already. The "nest" of lettuce belongs to the same moment: individual composed salads served on lettuce cups rather than tossed in a bowl, with garnishes cut from beet, pimento or hard-boiled egg white. Canned pimento, at first imported from Spain and later grown commercially in Georgia, gave cooks a red accent that held its colour, which is precisely what a pickled beet does not do against a pale dressing.