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Salad, Waldorf-Astoria
Cut into julienne strips one good-sized pickled beetroot, two medium, sound peeled and cored apples, two very tender well-cleaned stalks white celery, four Spanish sweet peppers, and place all in a bowl. Crack and carefully pick out the perfect meats from thirty-six sound hazel nuts, cut each one in quarters and place with the rest, toss them well in bowl, season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well, wipe the bowl all around and serve.
A pre-mayonnaise-and-walnuts version of the Waldorf, built as a julienne salad with pickled beet and hazelnuts. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the ingredients need translating.
- Julienne means matchsticksCut everything to roughly the same size, about 1/8 inch thick and 1 1/2 to 2 inches long. The dish depends on uniform strips, not dice; a mandoline or a steady knife both work.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely the tinned or jarred pimientos of the period, roasted and peeled, though fresh sweet peppers cannot be ruled out. Drain and blot them dry so they do not bleed into the apple.
- Pickled beetrootA jar of sliced pickled beets works; cut the slices into strips. Add it last and toss lightly, or the whole salad turns magenta within a minute.
- Thirty-six hazelnutsAbout 2 1/2 to 3 oz in the shell, or roughly 1/4 cup of shelled kernels. Toast them briefly and rub off the papery skins, which are bitter, before quartering.
- Apples"Sound peeled and cored" apples of the period would be firm and tart-sweet. Any crisp modern apple does; toss the strips in a little lemon juice to hold the colour while you cut the rest.
- The dressingThe book assumes a house dressing kept on hand and does not say what it is; a mayonnaise-type dressing is the likeliest reading. Four tablespoons is a light coating for this quantity: the salad should look dressed, not bound.
- "Wipe the bowl all around"A service instruction, not a cooking one. Clean the smears from the inside rim of the serving bowl with a cloth before it goes to the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest about four as a side salad. Assemble and dress within half an hour of serving; celery and pimiento both shed water on standing.
The Waldorf salad is generally traced to Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel of New York's Waldorf, in the mid-1890s, and the earliest printed versions are startlingly plain: apple and celery in mayonnaise, nothing else. Nuts were not part of the original description and arrived later, at which point walnuts largely displaced other choices. This version catches the dish mid-evolution: still apple and celery at its core, but dressed up with pickled beet, sweet peppers and quartered hazelnuts, and cut in julienne rather than chunks. It is a reminder that famous restaurant dishes were rarely fixed recipes so much as house formulas that each cook adjusted.