Home › Salads › Nut and Celery Salad II
Nut and Celery Salad II
Mix one and one-half cups finely cut celery, one cup pecan nut meats broken in pieces, and one cup shredded cabbage. Moisten with Cream Dressing, and serve in a salad bowl made of a small white cabbage.
A three-ingredient salad whose success rests almost entirely on texture: everything must be cold, crisp and cut fine. The assembly takes ten minutes once the cabbage bowl is made.
- Cream DressingIn books of this period 'cream dressing' is generally not whipped cream but either a cooked dressing thickened with flour and egg, or thin cream seasoned with salt, mustard and vinegar; check the book's own dressing chapter for which form it gives. Either works here; a modern equivalent is mayonnaise loosened with a few spoonfuls of cream and sharpened with lemon or cider vinegar.
- The cabbage bowlChoose a firm, tight white cabbage, cut off the top third, and hollow the base with a paring knife and spoon, leaving a shell about half an inch thick. Set it upside down in cold water for half an hour to firm up, then drain well before filling.
- Cut the celery fine"Finely cut" means small dice or thin crosswise slices, not sticks. Use the inner ribs; the outer ones are stringy and should be peeled or saved for stock.
- CrispingSoak the shredded cabbage and cut celery in ice water for 15-20 minutes, then dry thoroughly in a towel or spinner. Wet vegetables will thin the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl.
- PecansToasting the meats at 350F for 6-8 minutes, then cooling them completely, deepens the flavor and keeps them from going soft. Add them at the last moment for the same reason.
- Dress lateSalt in the dressing draws water from cabbage and celery within minutes. Combine and moisten immediately before the salad goes to the table.
- YieldAbout three and a half cups of salad, enough for four to six as a side. The cabbage shell is presentation only, though it can be shredded for another salad afterward.
Celery was still something of a luxury in American households when this book appeared: it was expensive to grow, blanched in trenches or boards to keep it pale, and often set out whole in tall cut-glass celery vases as a mark of a well-laid table. Pecans, native to the Mississippi valley and the South, appear often in cookbooks of the period, which pair them freely with celery and apple, though commercial grafted pecan orcharding expanded mainly in the early twentieth century. Serving a salad in a hollowed vegetable — a cabbage, a tomato, a green pepper, a scooped-out apple — was a common convention in the era's cookbooks, when a salad course was judged on its appearance at least as much as its taste. The "II" in the title probably reflects the book's habit of numbering variations on a formula rather than renaming them.