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February 10
Menu: Broiled Beefsteak; Baked Potatoes Creamed Onions; Waldorf Salad; Jellied Figs Nut Cookies; Coffee Waldorf Salad-1 quart chopped apples, 2 cups diced celery, 1½ cups blanched and shredded almonds, and 2/3 cup rolled pecan nut meats. Dress with following dressing, adding little more sugar and lemon juice to taste, just before serving. Mix 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1 teaspoon each mustard and white sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 14 teaspoon pepper. Add 2 well beaten egg yolks and then beat in slowly 4 tablespoons lemon juice. Cook in double boiler till it thickens. Then add whites 2 eggs beaten stiff. Keep on ice till wanted. Stir in 1 cup whipped cream just before serving. This is very good made with 5 egg yolks and ½ cup thin cream if whipping cream is unobtainable.
A cooked, custard-style boiled dressing lightened with whipped cream, poured over a very generous bowl of apples, celery and nuts. The dressing is the work; the salad itself is assembly.
- Scale and yieldA quart of chopped apples is roughly 1¼–1½ lb, or four to five medium apples, and with the celery and nuts this feeds eight to ten as a side. Halve everything for a household of four.
- CriscoThe book's own product: a hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911. One tablespoon melted is simply a neutral fat to carry the mustard and salt; any flavourless oil does the same job.
- The mustard"1 teaspoon mustard" here most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would add vinegar and water the recipe does not account for.
- Cooking the baseOver simmering — not boiling — water, stir constantly until the yolk mixture coats the spoon, around 170–175°F. Lemon juice makes the yolks curdle faster than a plain custard would, so pull it the moment it thickens.
- The raw whitesThe beaten whites go in after cooking and are never heated. Use pasteurized whites, or fold them into the base while it is still hot off the heat and hold it cold; otherwise leave them out and rely on the whipped cream for lightness.
- Keep on iceRefrigerate, and treat this as a same-day dressing. The egg-and-cream base will not hold more than a day or two.
- ApplesChop them last and toss immediately in a little of the lemon juice, or they will brown before the dressing goes on. A firm tart variety holds its shape against the cream.
- "Rolled" pecansCrushed under a rolling pin rather than chopped with a knife — a coarser, more uneven texture, which is what you want against the shredded almonds.
- The cream variationThe five-yolk, half-cup-of-thin-cream version makes a richer, denser dressing with less aeration, since the whipped cream is dropped though the beaten whites remain. It is the better choice if you want something that clings rather than one that mounds.
The Waldorf salad is generally traced to Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel of New York's Waldorf Hotel in the 1890s, and in its first form it was nothing but apples, celery and mayonnaise. Nuts were a later addition that quickly became standard, and by the time this version appeared the dish had been thoroughly domesticated into the American home repertoire. What marks it as belonging to The Story of Crisco is the dressing: rather than a mayonnaise built on olive oil, it is a cooked boiled dressing started with a spoonful of melted shortening, one of many places in the book where the new hydrogenated fat is quietly substituted into a familiar preparation. Its placement in the Calendar of Dinners, dated to a February day, reflects the practical logic of the season — apples, celery and nuts were the salad materials that could still be had in midwinter.