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String Bean Salad
Marinate two cups cold string beans with French Dressing. Add one teaspoon finely cut chives. Pile in centre of salad dish and arrange around base thin slices of radishes overlapping one another. Garnish top with radish cut to represent a tulip. Potato Salad I Cut cold boiled potatoes in one-half inch cubes. Sprinkle four cupfuls with one-half tablespoon salt and one-fourth teaspoon pepper. Add four tablespoons oil and mix thoroughly; then add two tablespoons vinegar. A few drops of onion juice may be added, or one-half tablespoon chives finely cut. Arrange in a mound and garnish with whites and yolks of two "hard-boiled" eggs, cold boiled red beets, and parsley. Chop whites and arrange on one-fourth of the mound; chop beets finely, mix with one tablespoon vinegar, and let stand fifteen minutes; then arrange on fourths of mounds next to whites. Arrange on remaining fourth of mound yolks chopped or forced through a potato ricer. Put small sprigs of parsley in lines dividing beets from eggs; also garnish with parsley at base.
Two composed salads printed as one entry: a marinated green bean salad and the book's first potato salad, both built to be looked at as much as eaten. Neither requires cooking beyond boiling vegetables, so the work is in seasoning and assembly.
- French Dressing, as this book means itFarmer's French Dressing is roughly half a teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon pepper, four tablespoons oil and two tablespoons vinegar, stirred until blended — twice as much oil as vinegar, with no mustard, no sugar, no emulsifier. Any plain oil-and-vinegar dressing in that ratio will do.
- Marinate while warm"Cold string beans" means leftovers, but the salad is better if you dress the beans while they are still slightly warm from boiling; they absorb the vinaigrette instead of shedding it. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough.
- Beans should still have bitePeriod cookery boiled green beans until fully soft. Modern practice is 4-6 minutes in well-salted boiling water, then straight into ice water to hold the color, which matters here since the dish is a centerpiece.
- Potato choiceWaxy or all-purpose potatoes hold a half-inch cube; russets crumble as you fold. The recipe calls for cold boiled potatoes, but dressing the cubes while still warm helps the seasoning penetrate; keep the order given — oil first, then vinegar.
- "Hard-boiled" in quotation marksThe quotes are Farmer's own, part of her preference for eggs cooked below the boil rather than actually boiled: a long, gentle cooking in water held under boiling point so the whites stayed tender and the yolks did not turn green and sulfurous. Simmering gently off the heat for 10-12 minutes accomplishes the same thing faster.
- Why the beets rest in vinegarThe fifteen-minute stand seasons the beets; draining them before arranging will also help keep the dyed liquid from bleeding into the potato.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects. It gives the flavor without visible pieces, which is the point in a salad meant to look composed.
- The radish tulipCut four or five shallow petal-shaped slices down the sides of a trimmed round radish without detaching them, then chill in ice water so the petals spring open. This is standard nineteenth-century vegetable garnish work and takes a minute per radish.
- YieldTwo cups of beans serves three or four as a side; the four cups of potato serves six to eight. Both are meant for a shared dish, not individual plates.
Composed, molded and garnished salads were the fashionable end of American salad-making around 1900, and this pair shows why: the potato salad is quartered like a heraldic shield in chopped white, chopped yolk, beet and parsley, with the vegetables doing the work that piped cream would do on a cake. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) was written for a readership learning to serve salad as a distinct course rather than as pickle-adjacent relish, and the salad chapter accordingly spends as much attention on arrangement as on dressing. Chives, radishes and beets were all common kitchen-garden crops, which is part of the appeal, but they cost knife time. The insistence on "hard-boiled" in quotation marks is Farmer's, and appears throughout the book; she taught that eggs cooked in water held below boiling were both more digestible and better textured.