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Washington Salad
Rub together one-half cup each of butter and grated cheese, one cup flour, and a little paprika and salt. Mix with ice water, roll out very thin and cut in straws. Bake in quick oven. When cool, pile in log cabin style on a large plate, leaving a center space sufficient to hold salad for the number of persons to be served. For the salad take equal parts of celery hearts, cooked hearts of artichokes, canned white cherries and diced grape fruit pulp. Mix well with French dressing and decorate with a large spoonful of mayonnaise. Serve two cheese straws with each portion of salad.
Two recipes in one: a short cheese pastry and a fruit-and-vegetable salad it frames. The pastry is the fussier half, and the joke of the presentation only works if the straws are stiff enough to stack.
- Quick ovenConventionally read as roughly 400-450F. Cheese straws rolled very thin bake fast at that heat; watch them from about minute six, since the fat and cheese take them from pale to scorched quickly.
- Grated cheeseIn American books of this period this usually meant a hard, dry, well-aged cheese, often a sharp store cheddar or Parmesan. A moist modern block cheddar will weep fat and slacken the dough; use something dry and grate it fine.
- Handling the doughEssentially a short crust enriched with cheese. Keep the butter cold, add the ice water a spoonful at a time until it just coheres, and chill before rolling. The recipe gives no dimensions; strips about a third of an inch wide and a few inches long work.
- Canned white cherriesLight-fleshed sweet cherries of the Royal Ann or Napoleon type, canned in syrup. Drain them well and blot dry, or the syrup will thin the dressing. Jarred pitted light sweet cherries are the closest current equivalent; maraschino cherries are not.
- Artichoke heartsThe original assumes you have boiled globe artichokes and trimmed them down. Jarred or frozen hearts, drained and quartered, do the same job. Marinated hearts bring their own vinegar and will fight the French dressing.
- French dressingIn American books of this period this is simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Grapefruit"Diced grapefruit pulp" means segments cut free of membrane and broken into pieces. Do this over a bowl, discard the juice or the salad will be soupy, and dress the salad at the last moment.
- Assembly and yieldLog cabin style presumably means laying the straws in alternating pairs at right angles to build a low wall around a central well. The pastry quantity gives roughly three to four dozen straws; the salad has no stated quantities, the recipe leaving the amount to the number of persons served, at two straws each.
Dishes named for Washington multiply in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, part of the same Colonial Revival enthusiasm that produced Martha Washington cake, and the white cherries and log-cabin wall here echo the hatchet story and frontier nostalgia, neither of which has much to do with the actual man. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at hostesses who wanted a table that looked composed without a professional cook, and this salad is exactly that: canned cherries, canned or home-boiled artichoke hearts and winter grapefruit, all shelf-stable or imported, arranged for effect. Grapefruit itself was still a comparative novelty in Northern households, moving north from Florida groves by rail in the 1890s and 1900s, which may be part of why it turns up in so many fashionable salads of the period.