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Salad of Greens
Left-over spinach or greens of any kind may be molded in small cups and served cold with French or mayonnaise dressing. The little balls of cottage cheese (see page 179) are good with this.
Mixed Salad (Italian) Put lettuce leaves into a deep bowl, add a little cauliflower, two or three sardines, and two large potatoes cut in pieces. Mix well together, add salt, vinegar, and oil, and garnish with hard-cooked eggs.
Two ideas in one entry: a molded cold spinach salad, and an Italian mixed salad that is essentially a potato-and-lettuce composed plate. Neither has quantities worth arguing with, but both assume habits of the leftover cook that need spelling out.
- Squeeze the greens hardThe molding only works if the cooked spinach is pressed nearly dry — wring it in a towel or press it in a sieve. Wet greens will slump out of the cup in a puddle and no dressing will cling to them.
- "Molded in small cups"Pack the chopped greens firmly into teacups, ramekins or muffin cups, chill an hour, then invert onto the plate. A brief chill sets the shape; there is no gelatin here, so the mold is only as tight as you packed it.
- French dressing in 1900French dressing here -- Not the sweet orange bottled kind. In this period it generally meant oil and vinegar, commonly around three to one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, and nothing else unless you add it.
- Handling the leftover greensCooked spinach should have gone into the refrigerator promptly and be used within a couple of days. Greens left standing at room temperature in a warm kitchen are not worth the risk.
- The cauliflower is cookedThe cauliflower and potatoes -- The potatoes must be boiled to be edible cut up in a salad, and the cauliflower was most likely cooked too, though the recipe does not say. Raw cauliflower florets work, but the dish reads as soft and tender against the crisp lettuce.
- SardinesTwo or three oil-packed sardines, drained and broken up, are enough to season the whole bowl. Their oil can stand in for part of the dressing oil if you like the flavor.
- Dress the potatoes firstWarm or room-temperature potato absorbs vinegar and oil; cold potato repels it. Toss the potato pieces with the salt, vinegar and oil on their own, then fold in the lettuce and cauliflower just before serving so the leaves do not wilt.
- YieldAs written the mixed salad would serve about two as a light lunch. The molded greens depend entirely on how much spinach you have left over; the recipe gives no quantity.
Books of leftovers were a whole genre in American and British publishing from the 1890s through the First World War, born of the same middle-class anxiety about waste that produced domestic-science schools and household account books. The Italian mixed salad here reflects a period fascination with continental cooking arriving through immigration and travel: a salad built on cooked potato and preserved fish, dressed simply with oil and vinegar, made use of the tinned sardine, an inexpensive imported ingredient. The cottage-cheese balls cross-referenced to page 179 point to how these books were used hrough for for a way to put two remnants together into something that looked deliberate on the plate.