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Daisy Salad
Cut the whites of eight hard boiled eggs into rings and mix the yolks with one pint of good mayonnaise dressing. On a platter arrange lettuce leaves in a circle so that every two will be in a round or cup-like shape. On these cups arrange the egg rings to simulate daisy petals and heap the yolks in the center. ASPARAGUS À LA VINAGRETTE-Let asparagus which has been previously cooked, stand in French dressing, on the ice for at least one hour. It should be served alone and left whole.
A composed salad from the era when a salad was expected to look like something. The whole effect depends on the egg whites holding their shape, so the eggs and the knife matter more than anything else here.
- The hinge: cutting the whitesChill the hard-boiled eggs thoroughly before slicing, and cut them crosswise with a very thin wet blade or an egg slicer so the white comes away in clean rings. Warm or soft-set eggs tear and the petals collapse.
- Cook the eggs so the yolks are firmRings need fully set whites and dry, crumbly yolks: about 10-12 minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water. Jammy yolks will loosen the mayonnaise into a puddle.
- A pint of mayonnaise is a great dealTwo cups of dressing to eight yolks gives a loose, soupy mound. Half that, around 3/4 to 1 cup, makes a heap that holds its shape; sieve the yolks first and fold them in, adding dressing until it just mounds on a spoon.
- Lettuce for cupsButterhead types -- Boston or Bibb -- have the natural bowl shape being described. Romaine hearts also work; iceberg wedges do not nest into cups.
- "On the ice"Standing on the ice means the coldest part of the icebox. Refrigerate, and do not leave the finished platter out at room temperature for more than an hour or two.
- Raw egg in the dressingPeriod mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil and vinegar. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- French dressing, for the asparagusIn 1911 this means a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, shaken hard. It is not the sweet orange-red bottled dressing that later took the name.
- The asparagusCook whole spears only until a knife slips into the thickest part with slight resistance -- 3 to 5 minutes for medium spears -- then cool quickly so they stay green. An hour in the dressing is a marinade, not a pickle; much longer and the tips turn olive and limp.
- YieldEight eggs makes a platter for six to eight as a first course or luncheon salad.
Salads like this one belong to the great age of the composed, moulded and "fancy" salad in American cooking, roughly 1890 to 1930, when the household magazines that produced books like this one treated the salad course as a chance for display rather than a bowl of greens. Butterick was a pattern company, and its cook book was aimed at the same reader as its dress patterns: a woman running a household without a trained cook but expected to set an attractive table. Hence a dish whose entire point is that hard-boiled egg, that cheapest of garnishes, can be cut and stacked into a flower. The asparagus recipe tacked on after it reflects the other half of the same fashion -- the vegetable served alone as its own course, in the French manner then filtering into American dining rooms, dressed simply with French dressing. "Vinaigrette" is misspelled here as it often was in English-language books of the period.