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Norfolk Salad
Cut in thin slices two medium-sized red tomatoes, one peeled cucumber, four branches crisp white celery and six vinegar pickles; place in a salad bowl, adding two chopped cold hard-boiled eggs, lightly mix the vegetables, then season with four tablespoons dressing, thoroughly mix and serve.
A cold composed salad of the type that filled the vegetable chapters of grand-hotel cookbooks: no cooking beyond the eggs, everything hinging on the cut and the dressing. A few of its terms need translating.
- Branches of celeryA "branch" here is a single rib from the head, not the whole bunch. Four ribs from the pale inner heart is what is wanted "crisp white" means the blanched inner stalks, so save the dark outer ribs for stock.
- Vinegar picklesSmall sour cucumber pickles cornichons or gherkins, or a firm dill. Six of them is a lot of acid for one bowl, so taste before adding all of it, and cut back on any vinegar in the dressing to compensate.
- The dressingUnspecified, as was normal in a book that gave its dressings elsewhere. Four tablespoons of a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing (three parts oil to one vinegar, salt, pepper) is the reading that fits; a boiled or mayonnaise dressing will work but will mute the vegetables.
- CucumberPeel as directed, and if you are using a standard waxed slicing cucumber, seed it as well. Salt the slices for ten minutes and pat dry, or the salad will pool water within minutes of dressing.
- Hard-boiled eggs"Chopped cold" is the point cook and chill them fully before chopping, or the yolk smears into the dressing. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into ice water.
- Order of workDress at the last moment. Tomatoes and salted cucumber both release liquid on contact with vinegar, and the celery loses its snap within a quarter of an hour.
- YieldServes four as a side salad, two as a light lunch course. Season with salt and pepper at the table the pickles do most of the seasoning already.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era of the large hotel dining room, where a printed menu needed a different salad every day and a place-name was an easy way to distinguish one bowl of cut vegetables from the next. The source of the name is not recorded. It may point at Norfolk, Virginia, whose truck farms shipped tomatoes, cucumbers and celery up the Atlantic coast by the turn of the twentieth century, or equally at the English county of Norfolk; the recipe itself says nothing either way. What the recipe does record is the appetite for the chopped, pickle-sharpened salad: cold vegetables, chopped egg, and a dressing counted out in tablespoons.