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Celery Salad, Mayonnaise
Pare off the green stalks and neatly trim the roots from two small stalks of white, crisp celery. Thoroughly wash, drain well, then cut into quarter-inch pieces. Dry well on a clean cloth, place in a salad bowl and season with two tablespoons dressing. Mix well, and, just a minute before sending it to the table, add three tablespoons mayonnaise to the celery; mix it well and serve.
A two-dressing salad of the old school: a vinaigrette first to season and draw out the celery, mayonnaise at the last moment to bind it. The order is the whole point.
- "Two small stalks" means two small heads"Two small stalks" probably means two small heads -- in older usage a "stalk" of celery was often the whole bunch, with what we call a stalk called a "branch" or "rib" (though the recipe also uses "green stalks" for the tops it tells you to pare off). Read it as two small heads, or one large one, trimmed of the outer green ribs as directed.
- "Two tablespoons dressing"Unqualified, this most likely means a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing. It is doing the seasoning; the mayonnaise is doing the coating.
- Dry the celery properlyThe instruction to drain and then dry on a cloth is not fussiness. Water clinging to cut celery will thin the mayonnaise and it will slide off into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl.
- Add the mayonnaise at the very endCelery dressed with vinaigrette begins weeping within minutes. Mixing the mayonnaise in a minute before serving keeps it thick and keeps the celery from going limp in a slack sauce.
- Pale ribs onlyThe recipe assumes blanched celery, grown banked up in soil so the ribs stay white, mild and tender. Modern green celery is sharper and stringier; take the pale inner ribs and peel any coarse outer ones with a swivel peeler.
- YieldNot stated. Two small heads of celery with three tablespoons of mayonnaise makes a small side salad for a few people. Serve promptly once the mayonnaise is in.
Celery reached the American table as a status vegetable rather than a staple. Blanching it white took trenches, boards or banked soil and weeks of patience, so through the nineteenth century good celery was expensive enough to be displayed upright in tall cut-glass celery vases on the dinner table, eaten raw as a relish alongside olives and salted nuts. Michigan's muck-soil farms around Kalamazoo, worked largely by Dutch immigrant growers from the 1870s, are generally credited with making it cheap enough to appear in salads like this one.