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Lamb or Veal Salad Creole
2 cups diced, cooked lamb or veal 1 cup coarsely chopped, cooked spaghetti 10 sliced, stuffed olives 1 cup minced celery Tomato mayonnaise Lettuce Combine the meat, spaghetti, olives and celery with the tomato mayonnaise to moisten. Arrange on lettuce and garnish with whole stuffed olives and extra mayonnaise.
A cold-plate supper salad built from leftover roast, held together by a flavoured mayonnaise. The only real decisions are the dressing and the state of the spaghetti.
- Tomato mayonnaiseThe book assumes you know this: mayonnaise loosened and coloured with tomato — either a few spoonfuls of tomato pur" ed with ketchup or chili sauce, or fresh tomato pulp pressed of its seeds. Figure about 3/4 cup mayonnaise to 3 tablespoons tomato, thinned further with lemon juice if it sits stiff.
- Cook the spaghetti soft, then chill itCold pasta firms up considerably, and al dente spaghetti in a salad reads as raw. Cook it a minute or two past the package time, rinse under cold water to stop it clumping, and drain well so the dressing is not watered down.
- Cut the meat while it is coldRoast lamb or veal dices cleanly straight from the refrigerator and shreds when warm. Trim the fat, which sets waxy on the tongue in a cold dish.
- Stuffed olivesPimiento-stuffed green olives, which is what an unqualified "stuffed olives" generally meant in American recipes of this era. Ten sliced olives is roughly a scant 1/4 cup; keep a few whole for the garnish as directed.
- Season itNo salt or pepper is listed and the dish needs both, plus a splash of the olive brine. Cold food mutes seasoning, so taste after it has chilled rather than before.
- Dress lightly, then again"To moisten" means just enough to coat — a heavily dressed meat salad turns to paste. The extra mayonnaise goes on the plate at serving, not into the bowl.
- Yield and safetyServes 3 to 4 as a supper dish. Since cooked meat and pasta sit in mayonnaise, keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table and do not leave it out more than two hours.
"Creole" on an American recipe of this period was often little more than a signal for tomato with peppers and/or onion, and this is that convention at its plainest: a leftover-meat salad recoloured with tomato mayonnaise and filed under a regional name. Its ancestry is plausibly the mayonnaise-bound meat salad that spread through American home cooking after commercial jarred mayonnaise appeared in the 1910s and reached wider distribution in the 1920s, which turned a laborious hand-beaten sauce into a pantry item and made cold bound salads a staple of the light supper and the ladies' luncheon. The chopped spaghetti is the frugal touch — a stretcher that bulks two cups of cold roast into a platter for four, and a reminder that in a household economy where a joint was cooked once and eaten several times, the second appearance may well have been helped by a new name to look like a new dish.