Home › Salads › For Salad (Quart chopped apples pint)
For Salad (Quart chopped apples pint)
1 quart chopped apples 1 pint diced celery 1½ cupfuls blanched and shredded almonds 2/3 cupful rolled pecan nut meats For salad. Mix apples, celery and nut meats.
For dressing. Melt Crisco, add mustard, sugar, salt, pepper, yolks of eggs well beaten, and lemon juice. Cook in double boiler till it thickens, then add whites of eggs stiffly beaten. Chill and add whipped cream just before serving. Dressing should be mixed with fruit.
A Waldorf-style salad with a cooked boiled dressing, from a cookbook written to sell a then-new product. The printed page gives quantities for the salad but not for the dressing, so read it as a method rather than a formula.
- The missing dressing quantitiesThe verbatim text names Crisco, mustard, sugar, salt, pepper, egg yolks, lemon juice, whipped cream and beaten whites but gives no amounts for any of them. Any figure here would be invention; use a boiled-dressing recipe you trust for proportions and follow this method.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, solid at room temperature and flavourless. In a dressing it stands in for butter or olive oil, and because it is solid when cold the finished dressing sets firmer in the refrigerator than an oil-based one.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerThe yolk mixture thickens in a double boiler, and the water underneath must never boil. Egg yolks set around 150-160F; hard boiling beneath the bowl will scramble them into grains that no amount of whisking will smooth out.
- Folding in the whites and creamThe recipe adds the stiffly beaten whites after the mixture has thickened (it does not say whether on or off the heat; off is the safer reading for texture), and the whipped cream only just before serving, as the recipe does say. Both deflate if held, and the cream will weep into the apples if the salad is dressed and then left standing.
- ApplesA quart of chopped apple is about a pound to a pound and a quarter, three to four medium fruit. Toss the cut pieces with a little of the lemon juice as you go, or they will brown before the dressing is ready.
- AlmondsBlanching means slipping the skins off after a brief soak in hot water; supermarket blanched almonds do the job. "Shredded" here means slivered lengthwise rather than the fine flakes sold today.
- "Rolled" pecansRolled nut meats were crushed under a rolling pin, giving coarse irregular pieces rather than an even chop. Two-thirds of a cupful is about 2½ ounces.
- YieldThe salad volume alone comes to just over two quarts once the nuts are in. Expect ten to twelve side servings; it was written for a family table or a luncheon party, not for four.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the years just after Crisco was introduced in 1911, one of the earliest and most successful examples of a manufacturer commissioning a full cookbook to teach households what to do with a new product. Nearly every recipe in it uses the shortening, including, as here, dressings and sweets where an older cook would have reached for butter or olive oil. The salad itself is a descendant of the Waldorf, generally traced to Oscar Tschirky of New York's Waldorf hotel in the 1890s, which began as nothing more than apples, celery and mayonnaise; nuts were a later addition that quickly became standard. Cooked or boiled dressings were widely printed alongside mayonnaise in American cookbooks of the period; they are usually said to have kept better and to have used less, and cheaper, fat than a raw oil emulsion.