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Apple, Nut and Celery Salad
Put one cupful and a half cupful of English walnut meats in a sauce pan, cover with boiling water, boil for ten minutes, drain and drop into cold water for half an hour; drain and dry in a towel and cut each half into many pieces; mix with this equal quantity of finely cut celery, and an equal quantity of tart apples; core and cut (not chop) in small pieces tart apples; mix well with salad dressing No. I.
A Waldorf salad in all but name, with an unusual pre-treatment of the nuts that is the whole point of the recipe. Read the walnut step first.
- The ambiguous quantity"One cupful and a half cupful" reads as one and a half cups of walnut meats; taken literally as two separate amounts it comes to the same thing.
- Why the nuts are boiledBlanching loosens the papery skin and leaches out the tannins that make walnuts bitter and astringent against sweet apple. Ten minutes is longer than needed; two to three minutes in boiling water does the job without turning the meats soft.
- The cold soakThe half hour in cold water firms the blanched nuts and stops them cooking further. Dry them thoroughly, as directed, or the dressing will slacken and slide off.
- Cut, do not chopThe parenthetical "(not chop)" attaches to the apples and it matters. Chopping bruises the flesh, releases juice and gives you a wet salad; a knife-cut dice holds its shape in the dressing.
- Tart applesLikely a firm apple of the Greening or Baldwin type. Granny Smith, Braeburn or a good russet stands in. Toss the cut apple with a spoonful of lemon juice to keep it pale while you assemble the rest.
- Salad dressing No. IIn books of this vintage that heading is usually a cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour, or a plain mayonnaise. Either works; a mayonnaise loosened with a little cream and lemon is closest to what the salad wants.
- YieldEqual parts of each give roughly four and a half cups of salad, enough for six as a side. Dress it within an hour of serving and keep it cold.
This is the Waldorf salad at the stage before it settled into its familiar form. The original, generally traced to Oscar Tschirky at New York's Waldorf Hotel in the 1890s, was only apple and celery bound with mayonnaise; walnuts, absent at the start, appear in versions like this one, though when they became standard is uncertain. Its appearance in a general household book shows how quickly a hotel dish could pass into domestic cooking.