Celery Salad
2 Bunches Celery 1 Tablespoon Oil 1 Teaspoon Sugar Salt, Pepper Wash and scrape celery and lay in ice cold water for several hours. Cut into inch lengths and add a dressing made from the other ingredients. Stir well.
A three-line celery salad from a period when "salad" often meant one crisp vegetable and the barest dressing. Nearly everything here depends on how cold and how dry the celery is.
- The hinge: soak, then dryThe long sit in ice water is the whole point — it firms the ribs and makes them snap. Drain and pat completely dry before dressing, or the oil slides off and the salad pools water in the bowl.
- Two bunches is a lotWhat counted as a 'bunch' then is not fixed, and period bunches were often sold untrimmed with more leaf than today's head. Two modern heads run 2 lb or more and will serve eight; one head with a single tablespoon of oil is closer to the original balance.
- The dressing is missing its acidOil, sugar, salt and pepper alone will taste flat, and the recipe names no vinegar. A tablespoon of cider vinegar or lemon juice to the tablespoon of oil brings it into line, though this is an addition, not something the text specifies.
- What "oil" meantWhat 'oil' meant -- 'Salad oil' in American cookbooks of the era could mean olive oil or cottonseed oil, both in common use. Either olive or a neutral oil works; the quantity is small enough that a good one is worth using.
- ScrapingScraping was needed because celery then was stringier and often grown blanched under soil. A vegetable peeler down the outer ribs handles it; the inner ribs and heart need nothing.
- Cut and toss lateCut into inch lengths only when you are ready to serve, and dress at the table if you can. Salted celery starts to weep quickly and loses the crispness the soaking bought.
- The leavesThe recipe does not mention them, but the pale inner leaves need not be discarded; chopped fine they add flavour to a very sparse dressing.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America — grown in specialised muck soils around Kalamazoo, Michigan, and elsewhere, and set out raw in tall cut-glass vases as a course of its own. Recipes like this one belong to that moment: the celery is the dish, and the dressing exists only to season it. A "bride's cook book" of the type collected and sold by church groups and publishers was aimed at a young woman setting up a household, so its salads tend to be short, cheap and simple, and they lean on whatever the grocer had in good condition.