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Other Vegetable Salads (Cups a little lemon juice)
the cups a little lemon juice or vinegar. Set aside to become cool. When ready to serve, arrange the cups on shredded lettuce and fill with cooked asparagus tips, cold and mixed with mayonnaise or French dressing, as desired. Peas, flageolets or wax beans, cut fine, may be used instead of the asparagus. Garnish with radishes.
The page picks up mid-sentence: the "cups" are vegetable shells — hollowed tomatoes, cucumber sections or blanched beet or turnip cases — that were prepared, acidulated and chilled in the missing lines above. Read what survives as an assembly method rather than a full recipe.
- The missing first halfWhatever the cups were, they have been hollowed, seasoned with lemon juice or vinegar, and set aside to cool. The instruction to cool may suggest cooked or blanched cases rather than raw ones, so any identification is a guess. If you use tomatoes: cut a lid, scoop, salt lightly, invert to drain, then acidulate.
- Everything must be coldThe one instruction that carries the dish. Cups, asparagus and dressing all go together cold; warm asparagus loosens mayonnaise and turns the lettuce limp within minutes. Assemble at the table's edge, not an hour ahead.
- FlageoletsPale green immature shell beans, French in origin and still sold dried or in jars. Dried ones need soaking and 45–60 minutes of simmering until tender but not collapsing; jarred are ready to drain and rinse.
- Asparagus tipsThe recipe says only 'cooked' and gives no time. Canned tips were widely sold at this date and may be what is meant, but the text does not say so. Fresh tips need 2–3 minutes in salted boiling water and an immediate plunge into ice water to hold the colour.
- "Cut fine"Applies to the wax beans rather than the peas — beans sliced crosswise into short lengths so they sit in the cup instead of bristling out of it.
- The mayonnaiseTurn-of-the-century mayonnaise was generally made fresh with raw yolks. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is acidified and behaves much the same here; if you make your own for an uncooked salad, use pasteurised eggs and keep the finished cups refrigerated until served.
- French dressingAt this date the term generally meant oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, shaken to a temporary emulsion, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar; the page itself does not define it. It drains to the bottom of a cup, so use less than you think and dress the filling separately.
- Yield and serviceOne cup per person as a first course or luncheon salad, two if it is the main plate. Shredded lettuce is a bed, not a garnish — cut it in fine ribbons so the cup sits level.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899) belongs to the moment when American salad turned architectural. The influence of French service and of cooking-school teaching pushed cooks toward the composed salad, in which each portion is built and garnished individually rather than tossed in a bowl, and the hollowed vegetable case — tomato, cucumber, beet, artichoke bottom — was among the vessels favored for it. The interchangeable fillings here may suggest something about the pantry that supported such food, though the recipe itself names no canned goods. Flageolets themselves are a French market bean, harvested young and dried while still pale, and their appearance in an American home cookbook of this date marks the same borrowed prestige that put mayonnaise and "French dressing" on the same page.