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Winter Salad
Neufchâtel or cream cheese Mayonnaise dressing I2I Chop carrots fine, season and sprinkle over lettuce; make cheese into balls, and add to salad.
Serve with mayonnaise (see page 74).
Tomatoes Sautéd, with Sauce 6 large slices tomato 1/2 cup milk 1/4 cup flour 1 tablespoonful butter Salt and pepper (Any left-over sliced raw tomatoes, if firm and solid, may be kept covered with cold water for use next day.) Dry the slices of tomato if they have been in water, season with salt and pepper, and dredge both sides well with flour. Melt butter in pan; when hot put in tomato, browning well on one side before turning. When both sides are brown remove to a hot platter. Gradually add milk to flour and butter in the pan, stirring well. Pour this sauce around the tomatoes and serve.
Two short entries from the left-over vegetable chapter: a cold plate built on cooked carrots and cheese, and a pan-fried tomato with a milk gravy made in the same pan. Both assume the cook already has the leftovers in hand and needs only the assembly.
- Neufchâtel then and nowAmerican Neufchâtel is a soft fresh cheese, close to cream cheese but generally with a little less fat and more moisture. Either the modern supermarket Neufchâtel or a plain full-fat cream cheese will roll into balls; the French Neufchâtel, a soft cheese with a bloomy white rind, will not.
- The carrots are cookedThe carrots -- The recipe does not say whether the carrots are cooked; the note about left-over tomatoes suggests these may be left-over boiled or steamed carrots, though finely chopped raw carrot would also serve. Season with salt, pepper and a little vinegar or lemon before they meet the lettuce, since cooked carrot on its own is bland against the mayonnaise.
- Chill the cheese ballsRoll them and refrigerate for twenty minutes before they go on the salad, or they slump on contact with the dressing. Rolling them in chopped parsley or paprika is period-appropriate and keeps them from sticking to each other.
- Dredge dry, fry hotThe hinge of the tomato dish is moisture. Blot the slices thoroughly, flour both sides just before they hit the pan, and leave them untouched until the first side has a real crust, or the flour slides off into the butter and you get mush rather than a brown slice.
- The pan sauce proportionsOne tablespoon of butter will not carry a quarter cup of flour. In practice most of that flour goes onto the tomatoes as dredge, and what remains in the pan is roughly a tablespoon or two of browned flour and fat. Add milk a little at a time to that residue, whisking, and stop when it coats a spoon; the milk quantity is illegible in the text as it stands, so go by consistency.
- Holding raw tomato slicesThe instruction to keep sliced raw tomatoes overnight under cold water belongs to a kitchen without reliable refrigeration. Cover and refrigerate, use within a day, and skip it entirely if the slices have gone soft — they will not brown.
- YieldSix slices serves two or three as a vegetable side. No yield is given for the salad, and the quantities of carrot and cheese are missing from the text as printed; scale by the number of lettuce cups.
Left-over cookery books of the early twentieth century sold themselves on thrift, and their vegetable chapters are the clearest evidence of what an ordinary kitchen actually had sitting in the cold pantry: boiled carrots, sliced tomatoes from yesterday's supper, a scrap of soft cheese. A "winter salad" in this tradition is generally taken to mean one built from roots and keeping vegetables rather than the tender summer greens, though the lettuce here shows how far commercial glasshouse and shipped produce had already reached the American table. The mayonnaise cross-reference is typical of the household manual: a single dressing recipe elsewhere in the book, invoked again and again so that the individual entries stay short.