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Cardinal Salad
Boil two large beets until tender; slice, cover with two tablespoons of vinegar and allow them to stand until the following day. Drain off the vinegar and use it in making a mayonnaise. Take one-half cup of white wax beans, one-half cup of peas, one-half cup of asparagus tips and mix with the red mayonnaise. Serve in little, rose-like nests of lettuce leaves and garnish with red radishes.
POTATO SALAD, No. I-Take one quart of potatoes; two tablespoons of chopped parsley; two tablespoons of grated onion; moisten with French dressing. Slice the potatoes while hot, mix the other vegetables with them, add more French dressing, and set in a cool place for two hours before serving.
POTATO SALAD, No. 2- Delicious potato salad may be made by the following directions: Boil about three dozen small German
A composed vegetable salad whose whole point is the color: beet-stained vinegar tints the mayonnaise a cardinal red. Note that the page runs on into two potato salad recipes, the second of which breaks off mid-sentence where the original page ends.
- The hingeThe beet vinegar is the recipe. Two tablespoons of vinegar poured over the sliced beets and left overnight draws out enough pigment to tint mayonnaise pink to red. The recipe has you use it as the acid in making the mayonnaise; if you add it to an already-finished mayonnaise instead, do it a little at a time, as too much at once can thin or break the emulsion.
- Drain the vegetables hardBeans, peas and asparagus tips carry water that will bleed into the dressing and dull the color. Cook them separately until just tender, shock in ice water, then dry them on a towel before mixing.
- White wax beansProbably what is now sold as yellow or golden wax beans, though 'white wax' was also used for paler-podded varieties. Cut them into half-inch lengths so they sit in scale with the peas.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a cup each of three vegetables comes to only about half a pound of salad in total, enough for perhaps four small servings as a first course. The recipe gives no quantity of mayonnaise; use only enough to coat, or the vegetables disappear.
- The lettuce nestsThe "rose-like nests" want the cupped inner leaves of butterhead or iceberg. Chill the leaves in cold water and spin them dry so they stay rigid enough to hold a mound of dressed vegetables.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggThe book assumes a hand-made mayonnaise from raw yolks. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, or stir the beet vinegar into a good commercial mayonnaise, which is made with pasteurized egg.
- TimingDress within an hour or two of serving. The acid in the dressing goes on working and the peas and beans lose their green after a long sit in the refrigerator.
- The potato saladsNo. 1 depends on slicing the potatoes while hot so they drink the French dressing; that step does most of the seasoning and cannot be skipped. A quart of sliced potatoes is roughly a pound and a half. No. 2 is cut off by the page break, so it cannot be followed.
The name comes from the scarlet of a cardinal's robes, and in period cookery "cardinal" attached to anything dyed red, from cardinal sauce for fish to cardinal punch. Salads like this one belong to the era of the composed and color-themed salad, when American cookbooks and women's magazines treated the salad course as a piece of table decoration as much as food: vegetables arranged in nests, rings and pyramids, tinted dressings, radish garnishes cut into flowers. The Butterick Cook Book came out of a dress-pattern publisher, and its salad chapter reads accordingly, with an eye on how a dish looks when it reaches the table.