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Indianapolis Salad
Place in a salad bowl six tablespoons cooked, cold fresh peas, add two cold boiled potatoes, two pickled beetroots and three slices Lyons sausage cut in small square pieces, six chopped anchovies in oil, one tablespoon capers, twelve sliced, stoned olives and two cold, chopped hard-boiled eggs. Toss well for a minute, season with five tablespoons salad dressing, thoroughly mix, neatly wipe the bowl around and serve.
A composed cold-cut salad of the Russian-salad family, built from things already cooked and chilled. Nothing needs heat; the work is in the dicing and in restraint with salt.
- Lyons sausageSaucisson de Lyon, a coarse-cut dry-cured pork salami studded with fat, sliced thin. Any firm dry salami works; the recipe asks for it cut into small dice rather than left as rounds, and how much three slices amounts to depends entirely on how thick they are cut.
- "Salad dressing"In an American book of this period the term often means a thick boiled dressing or mayonnaise rather than a vinaigrette. Five tablespoons is enough to bind the whole bowl; add it in two additions so the potato does not turn to paste.
- SaltAnchovies, capers, olives and cured sausage are all salty, and pickled beets bring acid. Taste before adding any salt at all, and rinse the capers if they are packed in brine.
- Cut sizeThe recipe specifies "small square pieces" for the sausage; the dish reads as a mosaic, so potatoes and beets are best cut to match in small dice. Waxy potatoes hold their shape; a floury baking potato will break down under tossing.
- BeetsPickled beetroots stain everything they touch. Drain them well and fold them in last if you want the peas and egg to stay their own colour.
- PeasSix tablespoons is a generous third of a cup. Frozen peas, boiled two minutes and chilled, are closer to the intended "fresh cooked, cold" than canned.
- Wiping the bowlThe final instruction most likely means wiping the smears from the inside rim so the salad sits clean in the bowl.
- YieldEnough for four as a first course or two as a light lunch. Dress it no more than an hour ahead; the potato absorbs dressing and the salad goes dry on standing.
Salads of this type -- diced cooked vegetables, charcuterie, eggs and pickles bound with mayonnaise -- descend from the nineteenth-century French salade russe and its many relatives, and they filled the cold-buffet sections of professional cookbooks for decades. Naming such salads after cities was a familiar conceit of hotel and restaurant kitchens, and a compendium called The International Cook Book is exactly the sort of place where an American city name would be attached to a thoroughly French construction: the technique, the Lyons sausage, the anchovies in oil and the capers are all continental. The connection to Indianapolis itself is decorative rather than documented, and no particular local tradition need be assumed behind it.