Nut Salad
Mix one cup chopped English walnut meat and two cups shredded lettuce. Arrange on lettuce leaves and garnish with Mayonnaise Dressing.
Nut and Celery Salad I Mix equal parts of English walnut or pecan nut meat cut in pieces, and celery cut in small pieces. Marinate with French Dressing. Serve with a border of shredded lettuce.
Two related salads in one entry, both assembled rather than cooked. The only real work is in the dressing and in the state of the nuts.
- "English walnut"The common walnut, Juglans regia — what any supermarket sells as walnuts. The term distinguished it from the native American black walnut, which is stronger, oilier and would dominate this salad.
- Toast the nutsOptional, and not in the original. Raw shelled walnuts that have sat in a bag can be limp; eight to ten minutes at 350F, then cooled completely, will crisp them, though it gives a toasted flavour rather than the raw one Farmer's freshly cracked nuts would have had.
- Shredded lettuceMeans finely cut, not torn. Stack romaine or iceberg leaves and slice crosswise into ribbons; do it just before serving or the cut edges brown and weep.
- Mayonnaise DressingFarmer's own recipe elsewhere in the book is a hand-beaten oil-and-egg-yolk mayonnaise thinned with lemon and vinegar. Any good mayonnaise loosened with a little lemon juice stands in; undiluted jarred mayonnaise is too stiff to garnish with.
- French DressingIn this book, oil and vinegar in roughly two to one with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name later came to mean.
- Marinate brieflyMarinate -- The recipe means the celery and nuts should stand in the French Dressing before serving. Don't leave them overnight; dress not long before the salad goes to the table.
- YieldOne cup nuts and two cups lettuce make about three cups of mixture, enough for perhaps four as a side salad, though the recipe states no yield. The celery version is easily scaled since it is equal parts by volume.
Nut salads belong to the turn-of-the-century American vogue for the cold composed salad, built on mayonnaise made by hand in the home kitchen. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896 and its many later editions) gives a chapter to salads of this kind, most of them assemblies rather than recipes in any strict sense. Walnuts and celery in particular became a standard pairing of the period — the same combination underlies Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s, where the original was apple and celery with mayonnaise and the nuts were added later. What the entry really records is a cooking school's habit of teaching by permutation: master one mayonnaise and one French dressing, and every salad in the chapter follows.