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Celery and Apple Salad
Have two stalks fresh, crisp, white celery. Trim off the outer leaves, wash thoroughly, drain well, then cut it into small Julienne-shaped strips, place on a napkin and dry it thoroughly.
Peel three, medium-sized, sound apples; cut them in quarters, cut away core and seeds, then cut them in Julienne strips, the same as the celery. Place both in a salad bowl. Season with four tablespoons dressing. Mix well and serve.
A plain julienne salad that depends almost entirely on the crispness of the celery and the timing of the apples. Two things in the original need translating: the word "stalk" and the unnamed dressing.
- "Two stalks" means two heads"Two stalks" probably means two heads -- in period American usage a stalk of celery often meant the whole bunch, what a supermarket now sells as a head, and individual ribs were sometimes called branches. Read that way, two heads with three apples gives a large bowl, so scale to one head if you want four modest servings.
- Use the hearts"Fresh, crisp, white celery" points to the blanched inner ribs. Trim the coarse dark outer branches off entirely rather than trying to julienne them, and peel the strings from anything fibrous with a vegetable peeler.
- Crisping and dryingIce water for 20 minutes restores limp celery. The napkin step matters more than it looks: any water clinging to the strips thins the dressing and makes the salad pool at the bottom of the bowl.
- The apples will brownCut them last, immediately before dressing, and toss with a little lemon juice if the salad is to wait more than a few minutes. A firm tart-sweet variety holds its shape best; a mealy apple collapses into the dressing.
- Which dressingThe book leaves it open. Four tablespoons of a plain French dressing (three parts oil to one vinegar, salt and pepper) is the lighter reading; a thinned mayonnaise is a plausible period alternative.
- YieldTwo heads of celery and three apples serve six as a side salad, four generously. It does not keep; dress and serve within the hour.
Celery and apple in julienne recalls the salad most people now know as Waldorf, which in its early form bound apple and celery with mayonnaise, the walnuts coming later. The bare version here reflects the standing of celery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when blanched white hearts were a prestige vegetable served in a tall glass on the dinner table alongside olives and radishes, and a good bunch was worth building a course around. Julienne cutting, whose name is often traced to the fine matchstick strips of French professional practice though the origin of the word is uncertain, was the mark of a trained hand in a household cookbook of this kind.