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Shrimp Salad
Take the shrimps from the shells, reserve the most perfect for garnishing, and break the others into pieces; marinate with French dressing. When ready to serve, drain, and mix with shredded lettuce, or celery cut fine, and mayonnaise. Shape in a mound on a bed of lettuce leaves and mask with mayonnaise. Use capers or olives, chopped very fine, to mark out five or six designs on the mound; a scroll effect is always pretty. Fill in the designs with shrimps and the rest of the mound with capers, sifted yolks or chopped whites of cooked eggs; or fill the designs with the capers or eggs and the rest of the mound with shrimps.
Finish with a tuft of lettuce at the top.
A late-Victorian composed salad in which the decoration is half the recipe. The cooking is trivial; the assembly is where the attention goes.
- French dressing, 1890s senseNot a sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken. The recipe gives no marinating time; twenty to thirty minutes is enough to season the shrimp, and there is nothing to gain by leaving them much longer.
- Drain thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Any dressing left clinging will thin the mayonnaise and the mound will slump within minutes. Tip the shrimp into a sieve, then blot on a towel before mixing.
- The shrimpThe recipe assumes shrimp bought or boiled in the shell, since it begins by taking them from the shells. Use cooked, peeled, deveined shrimp; small ones for the mound, the largest and most intact reserved whole for the border. No quantities are given; about 1 lb of cooked shrimp with lettuce or celery will serve four.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise here is uncooked and stays uncooked. If serving to anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise, and keep the finished salad refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- MaskingTo "mask" is to coat the shaped mound in a smooth layer of mayonnaise. A slightly stiff mayonnaise holds the surface; thin it with nothing. Chill the shaped mound for fifteen minutes before masking so it does not deform under the spatula.
- Sifted yolksHard-cooked yolks pressed through a fine sieve, which gives the fluffy yellow mimosa texture used as a filling colour. Whites are chopped separately for white. Both dry out quickly, so sieve them just before serving.
- Marking the designsTrace the scroll lines in finely chopped capers or olives with the point of a knife or a paper cone, then fill the compartments. Working from the outside in keeps stray bits off the finished sections.
- ServingAssemble no more than an hour ahead and keep cold. Shredded lettuce wilts under mayonnaise, so if making early, use celery, which holds its crispness.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties, published at the end of the 1890s, a product of the Boston Cooking School world in which salads were as much table decoration as food. The elaborate masking and scrollwork here belong to a period when a chilled, moulded, symmetrically decorated dish signalled a household with ice, time and a trained cook, and when American cookbooks were still absorbing French garde-manger presentation into home entertaining. Gulf canneries were shipping tinned shrimp by the late nineteenth century, which made such salads possible away from the coasts, though this recipe itself begins with shrimp in the shell. The chopped whites, sieved yolks and capers are doing what pastry-bag garnishes did on a chaud-froid, at a scale a home cook could manage.