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New London Salad
Place in a salad bowl two peeled tomatoes cut into eight pieces each, one sound, seeded, fat green pepper cut in quarter-inch squares, one stalk crisp white celery cut same size as the pepper, two cold, medium, boiled potatoes cut in quarter-inch squares, and twenty-four good-sized, sound hazel nuts cracked and cut in halves. Season with two tablespoons seasoning gently mix, add two tablespoons mayonnaise gently but thoroughly mix, neatly wipe bowl all around and immediately serve.
A composed salad of the Delmonico school, built on precise dice and a two-stage dressing. Everything here is done before the bowl reaches the table, so the assembly is the whole technique.
- "Two tablespoons seasoning"The recipe does not say what "seasoning" means. Two tablespoons of salt and pepper would be inedible, so it is most likely a made dressing of oil and vinegar; other books of the period sometimes use the word for a prepared salt-and-spice mixture. Treat it here as roughly 2 tablespoons of vinaigrette.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore the skins, drop them in boiling water for 15 to 20 seconds, then into cold water. Cutting each into eight wedges gives pieces large enough to hold their shape against the mixing.
- Hazel nutsHazelnuts and filberts are treated as the same nut for these purposes. Twenty-four good-sized kernels come to roughly an ounce. Toasting them briefly in a moderate oven and rubbing off the papery skins improves flavour and texture, though the original calls only for freshly cracked nuts.
- Potato diceBoil the potatoes whole in their skins, cool, then peel and cut. A waxy variety holds a quarter-inch cube; a floury baking potato collapses into the mayonnaise.
- Why "immediately serve"Salt draws water from tomato and celery within minutes, and that liquid thins the mayonnaise into a pool at the bottom of the bowl. This is not a salad to make ahead.
- YieldFour modest side portions, or two as a light lunch.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American hotel and restaurant cookery was catalogued dish by dish, each one named for a place, a patron or a house, and "New London" may point to the Connecticut port and summer resort rather than the English capital, though the book itself does not say, and the specific occasion for this one is not known. What marks it as professional cookery is the doubled dressing: a thin vinaigrette first, to season and penetrate the potato, then mayonnaise to bind. Hazelnuts in a savoury salad look novel now but were unremarkable then, when nuts were sold in the shell by the pound and a cook cracked what the dish required. The closing instruction to wipe the bowl all around is the tell of a kitchen sending plates to a dining room, where a smear on the rim mattered as much as the flavour.