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Portuguese Salad
Peel and cut in halves two medium, sound cucumbers. Remove spongy parts and finely slice. Slice very finely one small Spanish onion, two medium, fresh red tomatoes, two Spanish peppers and two sound peeled and cored apples. Place these in a salad bowl, season with four tablespoons dressing. Mix well and serve.
A raw chopped salad that needs no cooking, so everything depends on the knife work and the dressing. The one thing to get right is thinness: sliced coarsely, the apple and cucumber stay separate and watery, while paper-thin slices bind together under the dressing.
- "Spanish peppers"In an American cookbook of this period the term most likely means a large sweet pepper of the pimiento or bell type rather than a hot chile, though the usage was loose. Two red bell peppers, or a jar of drained pimientos, give the sweetness and colour that seem intended.
- Spanish onionStill sold under that name — a large, mild, pale-skinned onion. A small one might be around 6 oz. If yours is the size of a softball, use half, or substitute a sweet onion or a few shallots.
- "Remove spongy parts"This most likely means scooping out the seed core with a spoon after halving lengthwise, the wettest part of the cucumber. Field cucumbers of the period were thick-skinned and seedy; with modern English or Persian cucumbers there is little to remove.
- Salt the cucumber firstFor a salad that does not flood the bowl, toss the sliced cucumber with a little salt, let it drain 20 minutes, and pat dry before dressing. The original says nothing about this.
- The applesUse a firm, tart variety — Granny Smith, Braeburn, a russet. Slice them last and turn them in a little of the dressing or lemon juice immediately, or they will brown before the salad reaches the table.
- "Four tablespoons dressing"Left unspecified, presumably because dressings are given elsewhere in the book; a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette is the likely intention, though no proportions are given here. Four tablespoons is modest for this volume of vegetables, so dress, taste, and add more if the slices look dry.
- Yield and timingServes four as a side. Assemble no more than half an hour before serving and keep it cold — it slumps and weeps if it stands.
Chopped raw salads of cucumber, tomato, sweet pepper and onion belong to the whole Iberian and Mediterranean summer table, and the ingredient list here is essentially that of a Portuguese salada with apple added. The apple is the interesting part: it is often said to appear in Portuguese and Brazilian salads, though the evidence is thin, and what makes a salad "Portuguese" in a book like this is largely the compiler's shorthand for a national style. The International Cook Book belonged to a wave of early twentieth-century collections aimed at American cooks curious about immigrant and hotel cooking, and its national attributions are best read as gestures toward a cuisine rather than documented local practice. The reliance on "Spanish onion" and "Spanish peppers" points the same way: produce sold under Spanish names, standing in for anything Iberian.