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Celery and Sweet Pepper Salad
Cut away stale branches and leaves from two stalks fine white celery, neatly trim roots, detach all branches from the stalks, thoroughly wash in cold water, drain and wipe, cut in third-of-an-inch-square pieces, then place in a salad bowl. Cut three Spanish sweet peppers in quarter-inch strips and add to celery, season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A four-line salad whose only difficulty is its vocabulary: two of its terms mean the opposite of what a modern cook expects.
- "Two stalks" means two whole headsIn 1900s American usage a stalk of celery is the entire bunch, and what the recipe calls branches are the individual ribs. Two heads of celery, trimmed and diced, gives several cups.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are the thick-fleshed pimiento type, sold then either fresh in late summer or peeled in cans and jars. Three whole canned pimientos, drained and cut in quarter-inch strips, match the original better than raw bell pepper; if using fresh, choose red bells or true pimientos, not green.
- The dressing is assumedThe recipe does not specify one; a plain French dressing of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper is the likely intent. Four tablespoons is a light coating for this quantity.
- Celery hearts, not outer ribs"Fine white celery" points to the blanched, pale celery of the period rather than dark green ribs. Modern celery is greener and stringier; peel the outer ribs with a swivel peeler or reserve them for stock and dice the pale inner ribs.
- Dry it properlyThe instruction to drain and wipe is the hinge. Celery holds water in its channels, and any that remains thins the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl.
- CrispnessDiced celery can sit in ice water for 30 minutes to firm up, but dress it only at the table. Salt draws water from both celery and pepper within about ten minutes.
- YieldServes four as a side salad, or six as one course of a longer menu.
Alexander Filippini, long a cook at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book around short entries like this one. The salad reflects a period when celery was a prestige vegetable — trench-blanched, sold upright in tall cut-glass vases, and priced accordingly — and when Spanish-type sweet peppers were reaching American kitchens mainly in cans, an import trade generally traced to the last decades of the nineteenth century before Georgia and California growers took up the pimiento themselves. The pairing works as much on color and texture as on flavor: white against red, both raw and crisp, dressed barely enough to gloss them.