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Lettuce and Radish Salad
Prepare and arrange as for Dressed Lettuce. Place between leaves six radishes which have been washed, scraped, and cut in thin slices. Garnish with round radishes cut to represent tulips. See page 299. Serve with French Dressing.
A composed salad that assumes you have already read two other entries in the book. The only real work is the knife work.
- The cross-references"Dressed Lettuce" is the book's base entry: leaves separated, washed, crisped in cold water, drained thoroughly and arranged in a bowl. "French Dressing" here is simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together; period versions run around two parts oil to one of vinegar, so check the book's own entry before assuming a ratio.
- Dry the leavesThe hinge of any dressed salad: dressing will not cling to wet lettuce, and the water thins it into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. Spin or blot the leaves until they are genuinely dry.
- Which lettuceA soft head lettuce such as Boston or Bibb suits the dish. Crisphead types were also available by the turn of the century, though the iceberg of modern supermarkets is a later commercial development; romaine hearts are a fair substitute if you want more crunch.
- Radish tulipsTrim the root end flat so the radish stands, then cut four or five shallow petals down from the top with a paring knife, stopping short of the base. Drop them in ice water for 20–30 minutes and the petals open. This is Victorian table decoration rather than flavor.
- "Scraped"The recipe has the sliced radishes washed and scraped, presumably to remove grit and any tough skin. Modern bunched radishes need only a scrub; leaving the red skin on gives you the colour the dish is after.
- Dress at the tableSalted, acidic dressing wilts soft lettuce within minutes. Assemble the bowl, keep it cold, and add the dressing immediately before serving.
- YieldNo yield is given; one medium head with six radishes will serve about four as a side salad.
Fannie Farmer's book gives salads in modular form: a base entry such as Dressed Lettuce, a dressing entry, and then a string of short variations like this one that simply combine them and add a garnish. That structure is often said to reflect how the Boston Cooking School taught Ō principles first, then permutations — and it may be why so many entries in this section are three sentences long. The tulip-cut radish belongs to a late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for carved vegetable garnishes, when a salad was expected to look decorated rather than tossed; radishes, cheap and firm and brilliantly colored, were presumably a common material. French dressing at this date meant plain oil and vinegar, not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in America.