Home › Salad Dressings › Vegetable Salads with French Dressing (Lettuce shredded tomatoes)
Vegetable Salads with French Dressing (Lettuce shredded tomatoes)
8. Lettuce, shredded tomatoes and shredded green peppers. 9. Shredded lettuce, English walnuts, and almonds or cooked chestnuts, sliced. IO. Lettuce, Neufchatel cheese in slices and shredded pimentos.
II. Lettuce, cauliflower. string beans and shredded pimentos. 12. Lettuce or cress, artichoke slices and powdered tarragon. 13. Shredded cabbage and shredded green peppers. 14. Cauliflower broken into flowerets, string beans cut into small pieces, and beets cut in fancy shapes or chopped. Arrange each vegetable in a mass by itself; surround with lettuce. 15. Cucumbers and new onions, sliced. 16. Watercress, diced boiled beets, and olives in centre. 17. Lettuce, Brussels sprouts and chopped pepper.
A numbered menu of vegetable combinations, each meant to be dressed with plain French dressing at the table. The list assumes you know that firm vegetables go in cooked and cold, and that the dressing goes on at the last moment.
- The dressing itselfFrench dressing in this period means oil and vinegar, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion and used at once. Period versions vary; some add paprika or mustard.
- Dress at the last momentShredded lettuce and cress collapse within minutes of meeting acid and salt. Assemble the plates, then spoon over the dressing as they go to the table.
- "Shredded" means cut fine, not gratedFor lettuce and cabbage it is a chiffonade -- roll the leaves and slice across in thin ribbons. For peppers and pimentos it means narrow strips.
- Shredded pimentosThese are canned sweet red peppers, sold whole or in strips in most supermarkets. Drain and blot them; the packing liquid will thin the dressing.
- NeufchatelAmerican Neufchatel is a soft fresh cheese, slightly leaner than cream cheese and sold in the same case. Chill it hard and cut with a warm thin knife if it is to hold slices.
- Cooked vegetables must be cold and dryCauliflower, string beans, Brussels sprouts and beets are all boiled or steamed first, then cooled. Beets should be dressed separately or added last so they do not bleed into everything on the plate.
- ChestnutsCooked chestnuts here means peeled and simmered until tender. Vacuum-packed or frozen peeled chestnuts are a reasonable substitute; the sweetened glacé kind is not.
- Powdered tarragonDried tarragon ground fine. It is potent, so use a very small quantity; the recipe specifies no amount. Artichoke slices mean cooked hearts or bottoms, from a jar or a can, well drained.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or serving count; each combination appears to be arranged as an individual salad, dressed to taste.
Lists like this one belong to the era when the salad course was establishing itself in American middle-class dining, and cookbook writers of the 1900s and 1910s often supplied combinations rather than recipes -- the assumption being that a cook who could make French dressing needed only suggestions for what to put under it. The ingredients date the page precisely: canned pimentos, then a novelty from Spain and shortly afterward from Georgia, appear three times; Neufchatel names the soft fresh cheese that American dairies are generally said to have begun making in imitation of the Norman original; and English walnuts distinguishes the thin-shelled Persian walnut from the native black walnut that most households still cracked at home. The insistence on arranging each vegetable "in a mass by itself" reflects the period taste for salads composed as neat colored blocks on the plate rather than tossed together.