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Onion and Lettuce Salad
Strip off and set aside for any other purpose desired, the green leaves of two heads of lettuce, wash the hearts and drop them into ice-water to crisp them. Peel one small Spanish onion, and cut it into thin shavings. Shake the lettuce in a colander or wire basket to free it from water. Fill the salad bowl with alternate layers of the heart leaves and onion slices, sprinkling on each layer a little French dressing.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the layering is the whole point: dressing goes on as you build, so every leaf is seasoned without the lettuce being bruised or drowned.
- Spanish onionA large, mild, straw-skinned globe onion, still sold under that name. A sweet onion (Vidalia, Walla Walla) or a red onion is the closest common substitute; a sharp yellow cooking onion will overwhelm the lettuce.
- "Thin shavings"Thinner than you think — a mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater gets the near-translucent slices the dish depends on. Thick rings turn a delicate salad into raw onion with garnish.
- The hearts onlyTwo heads of lettuce yield surprisingly little once the outer leaves are stripped. A butterhead or romaine suits it; two heads will probably serve only three or four as a side. The recipe itself gives no variety and no yield, and directs the reserved green leaves to 'any other purpose desired' -- soup, a sandwich, a braise.
- French dressing, 1911 senseNot the sweet orange bottled kind. It means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three or four parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked to a temporary emulsion just before use.
- Crisping in ice waterFifteen to thirty minutes is enough. Longer waterlogs the leaves, and any water left clinging will thin the dressing and slide it off — the shaking in a colander is not optional, and a salad spinner does it better.
- Dress and serveOil-and-vinegar sits badly on lettuce and the leaves go limp fairly quickly. Build the bowl immediately before it goes to the table.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose household titles were aimed at middle-class women running a home with little or no help, and its salad chapter reflects a period when salads were moving from an afterthought to a course in their own right. Layered rather than tossed, this one belongs to the genteel American salad of the era -- cool, crisp, lightly acidulated, and deliberately restrained next to the mayonnaise-bound and gelatin-set salads that fill the same chapters in books of the day. The Spanish onion had a long-standing reputation in America as the mild, sweet, eating onion, and recipes like this one lean on it: the onion is served raw, in quantity, with nothing to hide behind but oil and vinegar.