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Cardinal Salad
2 large beets
Mayonnaise made with vinegar
2 tablespoons vinegar from beets
½ cup wax beans
Lettuce
½ cup peas
Radishes for a garnish
½ cup asparagus tips
Boil beets until tender, slice, cover with vinegar and let stand until the following day. Drain off the vinegar and use it in making the mayonnaise. Arrange white wax beans, peas, asparagus tips and red mayonnaise in little rose-like nests of lettuce leaves, and garnish with red radishes.
A composed salad that depends entirely on one trick: the vinegar drawn off the sliced beets is what dyes the mayonnaise. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge is the beet vinegarSlice the cooked beets, cover with plain white or cider vinegar, and leave them overnight so the pigment leaches out. That stained vinegar is the acid in the mayonnaise, and it is the only thing making it "cardinal" red. Substituting fresh vinegar and a drop of colouring misses the point, and the beet vinegar also carries a faint earthy sweetness.
- Cooking the beetsBoil them whole and unpeeled with an inch of stem left on, or the colour runs into the water instead of the vinegar. The recipe calls for large beets, which will want longer than the 40-50 minutes a medium beet takes; the skins slip off under cold running water.
- Wax beansThese are yellow-white snap beans, still sold under that name. The recipe wants them pale for contrast against the red dressing, so cook them briefly in salted water and stop them in ice water rather than letting them turn olive.
- Quantities are by volume, cookedA half cup each of beans, peas and asparagus tips is roughly a small handful of each after cooking. This is a garnish-scale salad; the recipe gives no yield, but the quantities will fill only a few small nests.
- MayonnaiseA period mayonnaise is egg yolk, oil, and the beet vinegar beaten by hand. If raw yolks are a concern for who is eating, use pasteurised eggs; a bought mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of the beet vinegar will also take the colour, though it sets softer.
- Asparagus tipsCanned tips were widely sold in this period and may be what is intended, though the recipe does not say. Fresh tips blanched two to three minutes are firmer and better here.
- AssemblyCup whole leaves of butter or Boston lettuce into the "rose-like nests," pile the vegetables in, and spoon the red mayonnaise over at the table. Dressed early, the colour bleeds across the white beans and the effect is lost.
"Cardinal" in cookery is a colour word, associated with the scarlet of a cardinal's robes, and it was applied to dishes carrying a strong red: sauce cardinal in the classic repertoire is a lobster-tinted béchamel. Here the red is vegetable, got cheaply from beet vinegar rather than shellfish coral. Butterick was a dress-pattern company, and its household volumes were pitched at women running a house without a professional cook. The lettuce-cup salad, arranged in individual nests and garnished with radishes, was a common form of American salad-making in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when a salad was judged as much on its appearance on the plate as on its taste.