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Carrot Salad
1 cup grated raw carrot
1 tablespoon lemon-juice
1 cup chopped raw cabbage or
½ teaspoon salt celery, or cabbage and celery
Mayonnaise or boiled dressing combined
Lettuce leaves
Mix the ingredients well and serve on crisp lettuce leaves. The grated carrot may be combined also with cold boiled peas, with chopped nuts and apples, or with onions and radishes.
A plain raw vegetable salad from an era when uncooked carrot was still a mild novelty on the American table. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; untangling it is most of the work.
- Read the ingredient list as two columnsSet side by side, it resolves to: 1 cup grated raw carrot; 1 cup chopped raw cabbage or celery, or the two combined; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; ½ teaspoon salt; mayonnaise or boiled dressing; lettuce leaves. Nothing is missing, it is just interleaved.
- Salt and acid firstToss the carrot and cabbage with the lemon juice and salt and let them sit ten minutes before the dressing goes on. Grated carrot is dry and sweet, and it takes acid better before it is coated in fat.
- Boiled dressingThe alternative named here is the period's cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, mustard, a little flour or cornstarch and milk, thickened over water. It is sharper and thinner than mayonnaise and suits cabbage better; any standard boiled-dressing recipe will serve.
- Grate coarselyA fine microplane turns carrot to wet pulp that weeps into the dressing. Use the large holes of a box grater or the coarse disc of a food processor so the shreds keep some spring.
- YieldTwo cups of prepared vegetables dresses four small salad portions as a side, or two as a lunch plate.
- The variationsCold boiled peas, or chopped nuts and apples, or onion and radish read most naturally as alternatives to the cabbage and celery rather than additions, though the wording ('may be combined also with') does not settle it. The original gives no quantity for them; about a cup against the cup of carrot keeps the proportions of the main formula.
- Dress at the last minuteCabbage and carrot both shed water once salted and dressed. Assemble on the lettuce immediately before it goes to the table, or the leaves collapse.
Raw carrot was slow to be accepted as salad material in English and American cookery; well into the nineteenth century the root was chiefly a soup and stew vegetable, boiled long and often sweetened. Its appearance grated and uncooked in a book like this one reflects the early twentieth-century interest in "health" salads, driven by dietary reformers and by the new vocabulary of vitamins and minerals that entered domestic writing in the 1910s and 1920s. Butterick, better known as a pattern company, also published for housekeepers, and this recipe shows the type: two cheap keeping vegetables, a spoonful of lemon, a dressing left to be made up separately, and a short list of swaps so the same formula could be repeated through the winter.