Waldorf Salad
Mix equal quantities of finely cut apple and celery, and moisten with Mayonnaise Dressing. Garnish with curled celery and canned pimentoes cut in strips or fancy shapes. An attractive way of serving this salad is to remove tops from red or green apples, scoop out inside pulp, leaving just enough adhering to skin to keep apples in shape. Refill shells thus made with the salad, replace tops, and serve on lettuce leaves.
A very short recipe that assumes you already know how to make mayonnaise and how to keep cut apple from browning. Two details carry the dish: the apple must stay crisp and pale, and the dressing must be thick enough to coat rather than pool.
- Proportions and yieldEqual volumes of diced apple and celery, roughly 2 cups of each, dressed with about 1/2 to 2/3 cup mayonnaise, serves four to six. Dice both to a scant 1/2 inch so a forkful gets some of each.
- Keep the apple from browningToss the cut apple in lemon juice before it meets the celery. The original says nothing about it; a salad that waits half an hour will go brown at the edges without acid.
- Apple choiceUse a firm, tart-sweet variety that holds its shape — Braeburn, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith. Mealy apples collapse under mayonnaise. Leave the skin on for color unless you are hollowing the apples, in which case peel the scooped pulp.
- No nuts hereThis 1918 version has no walnuts. Chopped walnuts became standard later in the century; add half a cup if you want the modern salad, but the original is deliberately just apple, celery and dressing.
- Mayonnaise DressingThe book's own dressing is an oil-and-egg-yolk emulsion sharpened with lemon and vinegar, thicker and tangier than jarred mayonnaise. If you use a commercial jar, thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice and a little cream to get the same consistency.
- Curled celeryCut celery into 2- to 3-inch lengths, slit one or both ends into narrow fringes, and drop into ice water for an hour; the strips curl back. A garnish technique, not a flavor step, and it can be skipped.
- Canned pimentoesStill sold in jars in the international or condiment aisle. A strip or two of roasted red pepper does the same job.
- Apple shellsScoop with a melon baller, working from the top opening, and rub the inside with lemon. Slice a thin sliver off the base so the apples sit upright, and fill just before serving — the shells weep if they stand.
The salad is generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s and credited to Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose 1896 cookbook prints an apple-and-celery version dressed with mayonnaise. Fannie Farmer's inclusion of it here shows how quickly a hotel dish could pass into domestic teaching: within a couple of decades a New York restaurant novelty was a standard entry in the country's most widely used cooking-school text. The absence of walnuts is worth noting — they are not part of the earliest published versions and became conventional only later, which makes this a useful snapshot of the salad before it settled into its familiar form. The elaborate garnishing, with curled celery, pimento cut into fancy shapes, and the apple used as its own serving vessel, is characteristic of the period's salad course, where visual arrangement mattered as much as flavor.