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Remove (Clean parboil and drain one)
Clean, parboil, and drain one pint oysters. tough muscles, and mix soft parts with an equal quantity of cold boiled fowl cut in one-half inch dice. Moisten with any salad dressing, and serve on a bed of lettuce leaves. Sweetbread and Cucumber Salad I Parboil a pair of sweetbreads twenty minutes; drain, cool, and cut in one-half inch cubes. Mix with an equal quantity of cucumber cut in one-half inch dice. Season with salt and pepper, and moisten with German Dressing. Arrange in nests of lettuce leaves or in cucumber cups, and garnish with watercress. To prepare cucumber cups, pare cucumbers, remove thick slices from each end, and cut in halves crosswise. Take out centres, put cups in cold water, and let stand until crisp, drain, and dry for refilling. Small cucumbers may be pared, cut in halves lengthwise, centres removed, and cut pointed at ends to represent a boat.
Two cold salads from the same page: a chicken-and-oyster salad and a sweetbread-and-cucumber salad. The text has come through with a line dropped — the missing words are "Remove the tough muscles," meaning the hard adductor of each oyster.
- Parboiling oystersOysters need only to be dropped into their own liquor or simmering salted water until the edges ruffle, roughly 1 to 2 minutes. Anything approaching a full boil, or the several minutes "parboil" once implied, turns them to rubber in a cold salad where there is no sauce to hide it.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure: a pint is about 2 cups, or 16 to 20 medium oysters, giving roughly 3/4 lb of drained meats. Pair that with an equal volume of diced cooked chicken and you have four modest first-course servings.
- Cold boiled fowl"Fowl" meant an older stewing hen, simmered for an hour or more and firm enough to dice cleanly. Poached or gently simmered chicken thigh holds up better in dice than roast breast, which shreds and dries.
- SweetbreadsIn this period "a pair" means two sweetbreads (the throat and heart sweetbreads of a calf were often sold together), roughly a pound in all, and veal sweetbreads are what is meant. Soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours first to draw out blood, then parboil with a little lemon or vinegar; after draining, peel away the membrane while still warm and press under a weighted plate to firm them for cutting.
- Twenty minutes is not too longUnlike the oysters, sweetbreads genuinely want that time — the parboil sets them so they cube instead of collapsing. Cool them completely before cutting.
- German DressingThe dressing itself is given elsewhere in the book, not on this page. Any tart cream dressing or a thin crème fraîche stands in; a vinaigrette will not cling the same way.
- Cucumber cupsChoose firm small cucumbers, salt the hollowed cups lightly and drain them upside down before the cold-water crisping, or the dressing will thin on the plate.
- AssemblingDress both salads no more than half an hour before serving. Cucumber and oyster both weep, and a salad that has stood turns to soup in the lettuce nest.
Sweetbreads and oysters both figure in the American cold-salad course of the 1890s, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats both as ordinary market goods. Oysters were still relatively cheap and abundant on the East Coast, sold shucked by the pint from barrels, and thymus sweetbreads came with every calf a butcher broke down. What dates these salads is not the ingredients but the presentation: the lettuce "nest," the hollowed cucumber cup, the garnish of watercress. Farmer's chapter on salads is full of such carved vessels, and the instruction to cut a small cucumber "pointed at ends to represent a boat" belongs to a period when the cold table was expected to be looked at as much as eaten. The genre survived into the chicken-salad-in-a-tomato of mid-century American lunch counters.