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Vegetable Salads
These may be made of almost all kinds of cold cooked vegetables, using them separately or in combination. Bits of meat or fish may be added, or a few chopped nuts, if at hand. Lettuce or other salad leaves may or may not be used, as convenient. The materials should be carefully prepared, and the salad chilled before serving. A better flavor is given to many salads by mixing the materials with a French dressing a short time before the mayonnaise is added, which is usually just before the salad is ready for the table.
Various garnishes are used, as olives, beets fresh or pickled, capers, hard-cooked eggs, pickled eggs, buds and leaves of nasturtiums, pickles, etc.
The salad-maker should be artistic as well as ingenious, for harmony in color is essential. Overcrowding should be avoided. If the salad be served on a platter, leave a wide margin.
This is a method rather than a fixed recipe, and it assumes a cook who already knows what a French dressing and a mayonnaise are. The instructions that matter are the order of the dressings and the handling of the cold vegetables.
- The hinge: dress twiceCold cooked vegetables are bland and slightly waxy on the surface; a thin vinaigrette soaks in and seasons them, while mayonnaise only coats. The recipe asks for the French dressing "a short time before" -- twenty minutes or so is enough -- then fold in the mayonnaise just before serving so the salad does not go loose and weeping.
- French dressing, 1910s senseFrench dressing, period sense -- Not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means a plain vinaigrette, commonly about three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken and used unemulsified.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggPeriod mayonnaise was made at home with raw yolks. If you make your own for a salad that will sit chilled on a table, use pasteurized eggs, or use commercial mayonnaise, which is made with acidified pasteurized egg.
- Which leftovers actually workPotatoes, green beans, beets, carrots, peas, cauliflower and celery root hold up. Avoid reheated-then-cooled spinach, zucchini and other high-moisture vegetables, which collapse and dilute the dressing.
- Keeping the leftoversCooked vegetables should be refrigerated within two hours of cooking and used within three to four days; the same applies to any leftover meat or fish stirred in.
- Chilling"Chilled before serving" means genuinely cold, an hour in the refrigerator. Serve within about half an hour of dressing with mayonnaise, and keep the platter out of a warm room.
- GarnishesNasturtium buds and leaves are edible and peppery, and worth using if you grow them unsprayed; capers, olives and pickled beets do the same job of sharpening a soft-flavored salad. Hard-cooked eggs should be kept refrigerated and used within about a week.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about a cup of prepared vegetables per person as a side salad, two to three tablespoons of French dressing and a scant quarter cup of mayonnaise per four cups of vegetables.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to left-overs appeared in the English-speaking kitchen from the 1890s through the First World War, when domestic economy was taught as a subject and food waste was treated as a moral failing as much as a financial one. The vegetable salad suited such thrift well: it required no cooking, absorbed odd handfuls of whatever the previous day's dinner had produced, and belonged to the newly fashionable category of the composed salad, which American and British hostesses had taken up enthusiastically in the decades either side of 1900. The instruction to marinate in French dressing before masking with mayonnaise is often said to have been professional practice of the period and is still sound. So is the closing advice about color and margin. These salads were composed by eye, arranged on platters in deliberate patterns, and the author's insistence that the salad-maker be "artistic as well as ingenious" reflects a moment when thrift and presentation were expected to travel together.