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Celery and Almond Salad
1 cupful melted Crisco 1 yolk of egg 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 1 tablespoonful vinegar 1 head celery ½ cupful blanched almonds 1 crisp lettuce Few drops green color 1/2 teaspoonful sugar 1 teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful mustard Red pepper to taste Melt and cool Crisco. Prepare celery and cut into very thin strips and plunge in ice water until wanted. Blanch and shred almonds; wash and dry lettuce leaves. Put yolk of egg into bowl, add mustard, salt, and Salads red pepper and mix well with wooden spoon. Add sugar, teaspoonful lemon juice, teaspoonful vinegar; beat in Crisco gradually. Remove. spoon and beat with egg beater five minutes, then beat in rest of lemon juice and vinegar. Add more seasonings if needed and enough green color to make it look pretty. Dry celery and mix with almonds, then toss them into dressing. Serve on lettuce leaves. 1 tablespoonful Crisco Pinch of salt
This is a hand-made mayonnaise thickened with melted shortening, dressing shredded celery and almonds. The dressing is where all the difficulty lies.
- Melted Crisco will set solidThis is the hinge. Hydrogenated shortening is liquid only while warm, so a mayonnaise built on it firms to a pale, waxy paste as soon as it cools, and it turns greasy on the tongue. If you want the dressing the book describes, use a cup of neutral oil — mild olive, grapeseed, sunflower — and it will stay pourable.
- Raw yolkThe yolk is never heated. Use a pasteurized egg if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished dressing refrigerated and eat it within a couple of days.
- One yolk, one cup of fatThat is the usual mayonnaise ratio, though it needs care by hand. Add the fat drop by drop at the start, and if the emulsion breaks, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it slowly.
- Mustard and red pepperMustard here means dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard, and 1½ teaspoonfuls of it is assertive. Red pepper is cayenne; a pinch is enough.
- A head of celeryIn this period a head means the whole bunch, not a single rib. Trim the outer stalks, use the pale heart as well, and the ice-water soak is worth doing — thirty minutes makes the thin strips snap.
- Blanching almondsPour boiling water over whole almonds, stand two minutes, drain and slip the skins off, then shred while still damp; dry almonds split rather than slice. 1½ cupfuls is a generous amount against one bunch of celery — half that gives a better balance.
- The green coloringPurely cosmetic, and typical of the era's taste for tinted dressings. Leave it out with no loss.
- The stray last two lines"1 tablespoonful Crisco / Pinch of salt" appear to be a fragment of another recipe carried over from the page. They have nothing to do with this salad.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; roughly six as a side salad, and it makes rather more dressing than the salad needs.
Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, a hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, odorless, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter, and The Story of Crisco was the promotional cookbook that followed it, its recipes compiled by Marion Harris Neil. Salad dressing recipes like this one had a job to do: they demonstrated that the new fat could stand in for oil as well as for shortening, extending the product's claim across the whole kitchen rather than just the pie crust and the frying pan. Cottonseed oil was already a familiar salad oil in American households, so a mayonnaise built on its hydrogenated form was an easy argument to make on paper, if a less convincing one on the plate. The celery-and-almond pairing itself is standard early twentieth-century salad-course fare, when raw celery was still treated as something of a delicacy and served on its own dedicated glass dishes.