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Salad of Lettuce, Bamboo Sprouts, and Shrimps
Marinate a cup of shrimps, broken in small pieces, with three tablespoonfuls of oil, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, a dash of salt and pepper. Select the tender bamboo sprouts in a can, and cut them into small pieces of the shape desired. When ready to serve, dress these with salt, pepper, oil,
A cold composed salad in the early chafing-dish style: each element dressed separately, then assembled at the last minute. The oil-and-lemon marinade on the shrimp is doing the seasoning work, so it is worth getting that right.
- ShrimpA cup of picked shrimp meat is roughly 6 oz, which will take something over three-quarters of a pound of shell-on shrimp. Cooked, chilled shrimp broken into pieces the size of a thumbnail is what the recipe wants; canned shrimp was one common source at this date and needs a rinse and a pat dry if used.
- Marinating timeFifteen to thirty minutes in the refrigerator is enough. Lemon juice continues to work on the shrimp the longer it sits, so a long soak can dull the texture.
- Bamboo sproutsCanned bamboo shoots, sold sliced or whole. Drain, rinse well in cold water to lose the tinny brine, and blanch a minute if the canning smell is strong. "Tender" means the pale inner pieces, not the fibrous outer layers.
- Proportions of the dressingThree tablespoons oil to one of lemon juice is a 3:1 vinaigrette. A mild olive or a neutral oil both suit shrimp; a strong peppery oil will bury it.
- LettuceCrisp inner leaves, kept cold and dry, used as a bed or cut in ribbons. Dress the lettuce only as it goes to the table or it collapses.
- YieldEnough for four small salad plates as a first course, or two as a light lunch.
Bamboo shoots reached American kitchens in cans, and their appearance in a turn-of-the-century salad book says as much about the grocery trade as about Chinese cooking: imported tinned goods from Asia were by then stocked in some city markets, and cookbook writers tended to present them as a novelty vegetable valued for crispness. "Fancy" salads of this period often combined a shellfish, a crisp element and a leaf, each dressed on its own before assembly, so the composition here is conventional even though one of its parts came from halfway around the world.