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Various Compound Salads (Long radishes into straws)
long radishes into straws and season with French dressing. Scatter the straws in lettuce nests, arrange the eggs in the nests, sprinkle with dressing, and fleck with chopped parsley or paprica.
The text is a fragment — it begins mid-sentence, and the eggs it calls for were specified in the missing opening line (almost certainly hard-cooked eggs, halved or quartered). What survives is a complete method for assembling a radish-and-egg salad.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn a 1900 American cookbook this is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken to combine. It is not the sweetened orange-red bottled dressing that took the name later.
- Radish strawsCut the long radishes into fine julienne, about matchstick size; the text specifies only that they are 'long', not a variety. Dropping the cut straws into ice water for ten minutes makes them snap; drain and dry them well or the dressing slides off.
- Lettuce nestsCupped inner leaves of butterhead or iceberg, one per serving, set on the plate to hold the filling. Choose leaves of similar size so the plates match.
- The eggsHard-cooked eggs, cooled and peeled, halved lengthwise or quartered. Cook them just until set — twelve minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water — since a chalky, grey-ringed yolk is the usual failure in a dish this plain.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. Use sweet Hungarian paprika, and use it fresh; a tin that has sat for years contributes colour and nothing else.
- Dress at the last minuteRadish straws weep and lettuce collapses once salted. Season the straws, assemble, and serve immediately rather than holding the plates.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, one egg and two or three radishes per person, with about a tablespoon of vinaigrette each.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties, published in Boston by Little, Brown around the turn of the century (editions appear from 1899); Hill edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine and wrote for households where salad was becoming a course in its own right rather than an occasional relish. "Compound salad" was the period's term for a salad built from more than one prepared element, as against a plain salad of dressed greens — and the fashion of the moment was arrangement: straws, nests, flecks of paprika or parsley, each portion composed on its own plate. Radishes appear often in books of this decade, and they suited the decorative cutting that turn-of-the-century table service prized.