Home › Salad Dressings › Salad Chiffonade
Salad Chiffonade
Seed two green peppers, boil two or three minutes, then cut in shreds. Shred the light and dark leaves of a head of lettuce, or endive, separately. Cut three tomatoes in shreds. Remove the peel and skin from one large grapefruit.
Serve with French dressing, seasoning, and then arranging each article separately upon the servingdish, having a circle of light and then dark green material about the edge.
A composed rather than tossed salad: each element is shredded, dressed on its own, then laid out in bands of colour. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what French dressing is and how to break down a grapefruit.
- Chiffonade means shreds, not choppedEverything is cut into fine ribbons of roughly the same width so the plate reads as bands of colour. Stack and roll the lettuce leaves and slice across; the peppers and tomatoes are cut into strips of the same scale.
- The two-minute pepper boilThe two-or-three-minute pepper boil -- This is a blanch to soften the raw bite and set the green, not a cooking step. The recipe gives no further detail; cooling the strips promptly after boiling keeps them from slumping and dulling.
- "Peel and skin" the grapefruitPeel means the rind, skin means the membrane around each segment. Cut away rind and pith with a knife, then free the segments from the membrane so only flesh goes on the plate. Drain them well or the released juice thins the dressing.
- French dressing of the periodThe recipe assumes the reader knows it: broadly oil and vinegar, commonly around three to one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. Period versions vary, some adding paprika or mustard.
- Dress each element separately"Seasoning, and then arranging each article separately" at least means the components are kept apart on the dish; the simplest reading is that each is seasoned and lifted into place on its own, so the colour bands do not bleed.
- Light and dark lettuceThe recipe depends on a head with pale hearts and darker outer leaves, and offers endive as an alternative. Romaine or a firm butterhead gives that contrast; uniform pre-cut leaves will not.
- TomatoesShredding a tomato only works if it is firm and the knife is sharp. Seed the halves first so the plate does not flood.
- Yield and timingNo yield is given; the quantities listed (two peppers, one head of lettuce, three tomatoes, one grapefruit) would stretch to a small first course for several people. The peppers and grapefruit can be readied ahead, the lettuce cut nearer to serving.
Chiffonade derives from chiffon, a rag, and is often loosely rendered as a heap of rags; in nineteenth-century kitchen French it named herbs or greens cut into fine ribbons, said to be used chiefly to garnish soup. American cookery writers of the 1900s are generally thought to have taken up the word for salads built out of shredded components, and Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties belongs squarely to that moment, when the salad course was being reimagined as an exercise in arrangement rather than a bowl of dressed greens. The grapefruit may serve as a rough period marker: Florida groves were shipping in commercial quantity by the turn of the century, and the fruit moved quickly from a curiosity to a fashionable salad ingredient prized for its sharpness against oil and vinegar. The instruction to ring the dish with light green and then dark green reflects the era's conviction that a salad was judged first by the eye.