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Vegetable Salad Combinations
1-Combine one cup shredded cabbage, one-half cup grated raw carrot, one-half cup shredded apple and sections from one orange with French dressing or Mazola Mayonnaise. 2-One pint cooked kidney beans and one tablespoon little pickled onions (minced) combined with Mazola Mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce and garnish with cooked asparagus tips. 3-Allow a tomato for each person. Scald, chill, remove the skins, hollow to form cups and fill with equal parts of minced, cooked meat, fish, or chopped, hard cooked eggs and diced celery, apple or cucumber mixed with Mazola Mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce or cress with a garnish of extra Mayonnaise.
Three luncheon salads sketched in shorthand, on the assumption that the cook already has a jar of mayonnaise made from the book's own recipe. The proportions are sound; only the vessels, the brand names and the food-safety assumptions need translating.
- Mazola MayonnaiseThis is the book's house mayonnaise, emulsified with Mazola corn oil rather than olive oil. Any neutral-oil mayonnaise, homemade or jarred, does the same job; corn oil gives the pale, mild result the book is selling.
- Raw egg in the dressingA period homemade mayonnaise is uncooked yolk. If you make it rather than buy it, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salads refrigerated -- particularly No. 3, which combines mayonnaise with cooked meat or fish and sits at room temperature on a lettuce leaf.
- A pint of cooked beansTwo cups, drained. That is roughly a can and a half of the 15-oz size, rinsed, or about three-quarters of a cup of dried kidney beans soaked and simmered until tender.
- Little pickled onionsCocktail onions, sold in jars in vinegar brine. A tablespoon, minced, is a seasoning rather than an ingredient -- the point is the acid, so add a spoonful of the brine if the beans taste flat.
- Scald, chill, remove the skinsThirty to forty seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water; the skins slip off. Do not leave them in longer or the flesh under the skin turns to pulp and the cups collapse when hollowed.
- Salt the tomato cupsThe original omits this. Hollowed tomatoes weep steadily; salt them lightly, invert on a rack for fifteen minutes, and drain before filling, or the mayonnaise thins into a puddle.
- Shredded appleGrate or julienne it at the last moment and toss it with the dressing immediately -- the acid in the orange and the mayonnaise keeps it from browning. Leave the skin on for colour.
- YieldNo. 1 makes about four small side servings, No. 2 four to six, and No. 3 is calculated at one tomato per person. All three are luncheon portions, not dinner salads.
Books like this one were published by manufacturers to teach cooks new uses for a single product, and Mazola -- a corn oil from the Corn Products Refining Company, generally traced to the early 1910s -- needed to persuade American households that a bland vegetable oil could stand in for olive oil in mayonnaise and French dressing. Salad recipes were the obvious vehicle, and they arrived at a moment when raw vegetables were newly fashionable: the discovery of vitamins in the 1910s and 1920s gave home economists a scientific reason to press shredded cabbage, grated carrot and raw apple on families who had previously eaten their vegetables boiled. The stuffed tomato cup in No. 3 is the era's signature luncheon dish, an economical way to turn Sunday's leftover meat or fish into something that could be sent out on lettuce and called a course.