Celery Salad
"Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And scarce suspected animate the whole." 2 quarts of celery cut in small dice. The cream salad dressing of the last receipt. An onion grated or finely minced. Little salt. Mix well. Serve very cold with a little parsley sprinkled over the top. Best for lunch when there is cold chicken beside, or other cold meat. HARICOTS VERTS EN MAYONAISE, In other words string beans salad, appears in a menu of a dinner of the royal family of Spain, one that has been preserved as a model, among many others. Whenever canned vegetables have to be used--and some of the best brands do very very well for salads--drain the liquor from them and rinse them in fresh hot water before using. "But where are those hard-boiled eggs?" "Coming up!" "In dressing salad, mind this law. With two hard yolks use one that's raw."
A plain raw-celery salad that depends entirely on the dressing it is bound with and on being served properly cold. Two things in the text need translating: the quantity, which is larger than it looks, and the dressing, which lives on another page.
- Two quarts of celeryDiced celery measures loosely, but two quarts is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb trimmed, or two full heads. That serves eight to ten as a side salad, which fits its stated role alongside a cold bird at lunch.
- The missing dressing"The cream salad dressing of the last receipt" refers to a dressing on the preceding page, which is not reproduced here. Dressings under that name in this period range from cooked, boiled dressings thickened with egg to uncooked mixtures of cream, vinegar and mustard; the closing couplet about hard and raw yolks suggests an uncooked one. Any boiled dressing or a mayonnaise slackened with cream will stand in. Start with about a cup for this volume of celery and add more only if it looks dry.
- The onion"An onion grated" against two quarts of celery is a great deal of raw onion by modern taste, and the epigraph makes clear the intent is a background note, not a flavour in its own right. Half a small onion grated on a microplane, or a couple of tablespoons of finely minced shallot, gets the effect the verse describes.
- Raw yolk in the dressingThe closing couplet advises one raw yolk to two hard-cooked ones. If you follow it, use pasteurized eggs; the dressing is never heated after the raw yolk goes in, and the salad then sits cold before serving.
- Keeping the celery crispCelery weeps once salted and dressed. Cut it, hold it in ice water until you are ready, drain and dry it thoroughly, then dress it no more than half an hour before the table. Dressed early it goes limp and the dressing turns watery.
- Serving"Very cold" means the bowl as well as the salad; chill both. Parsley is scattered on at the last moment, not stirred through.
- The canned-vegetable noteThe advice to drain canned vegetables and rinse them in hot water before use still holds for the string bean salad mentioned in passing. It washes off the packing brine and the metallic edge; drain and cool them again before dressing.
The two lines of verse at the head of the recipe come from Sydney Smith's celebrated rhymed receipt for salad dressing, which circulated widely in English and American cookbooks through the nineteenth century. The original reads "half-suspected" rather than "scarce suspected," the sort of drift that happens when a thing is quoted from memory. Celery itself was a prestige vegetable in nineteenth-century America: it demanded trenching and blanching, arrived with the cold weather, and was set out upright in tall cut-glass celery vases so the household could see it. A cookbook of this period treats it as something worth two full quarts of, and pairs it with cold chicken at luncheon. The passing reference to haricots verts en mayonnaise at a Spanish royal table, and the shrug about good canned brands doing "very very well," catch the same book facing both ways at once — toward the French menu and toward the American pantry shelf.