Home › Salads › Beet and Celery Salad
Beet and Celery Salad
Boiled Beets Celery Lettuce Mayonnaise Scoop out inside of beets; cut celery into small bits and mix with mayonnaise. Fill beets with mixture and set them in ice until very cold. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves.
A recipe written in the shorthand of its day: an ingredient list with no quantities and the assumption that the cook already has mayonnaise and cold boiled beets on hand. The proportions are yours to set, but a few things are worth knowing before you start.
- The hinge: beets firm enough to hollowBoil medium beets whole with skins on until just tender when pierced, roughly 35-50 minutes depending on size, then slip the skins off under cold water. Overcooked beets collapse when you scoop them, so stop while there is still slight resistance at the centre.
- QuantitiesFigure one beet per person, about 2 1/2 inches across, and a scant 1/4 cup of diced celery with a tablespoon of mayonnaise for each. Chop the scooped-out beet centres and either fold a little back into the filling or keep them for another salad.
- ScoopingA melon baller or a grapefruit spoon works better than a teaspoon. Leave a wall about 1/4 inch thick, and level the base so the beet sits upright on the plate.
- "Set them in ice"This means an ice bath or the ice compartment of an icebox, not a freezer. An hour in the refrigerator does the same job; the point is that the filling should be thoroughly cold and set before serving.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise was commonly made at home with raw yolk and oil, and home-made versions tend to be thicker and sharper than the bottled sort. Bottled mayonnaise works, though a squeeze of lemon sharpens it against the sweetness of the beet.
- BleedingBeet juice will stain the mayonnaise pink within minutes of filling. Fill just before chilling rather than hours ahead, or accept the colour as part of the effect.
- CeleryUse the inner ribs and the pale heart, strings removed, cut into 1/4-inch dice. Old outer stalks are too fibrous for a salad in which celery is the only texture.
- ServingOne filled beet per person as a first course or as part of a cold luncheon plate; two if it is the salad course of a light meal.
Stuffed vegetable cases like this were a staple of the American salad course between roughly 1890 and 1930, when "salad" often meant something built and moulded rather than tossed. Beets, tomatoes and green peppers were all hollowed and filled, commonly set on a lettuce leaf and bound with mayonnaise. Cookbooks of the period leaned on such dishes, which were part of the visual language of a well-set table and could be prepared entirely in advance. The absence of quantities is characteristic of the genre.