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Bird's Nest Salad
Fashion small nests from cooked spinach, chopped and seasoned with salt, pepper, oil and lemon juice; when cold, arrange in the nests eggs of Neufchatel cheese flecked with paprika, shaped with the smooth sides of butter paddles. Fill in between the nests with dressed lettuce. Serve with brown bread and butter sandwiches. In serving the nests use a broad bladed silver knife.
A composed salad plate from the era when cold luncheon food was expected to look like something other than food. Almost nothing here is cooking; it is shaping, seasoning and temperature.
- The hinge: squeeze the spinach dryThe nests hold their shape only if the cooked spinach is pressed hard in a towel or sieve until it stops weeping. Wet spinach will slump and the oil-and-lemon dressing will pool on the plate.
- Quantities are not givenAs a rough starting point, about 1 lb of raw spinach cooks down to something like a cupful chopped, enough for perhaps two nests. Dress it lightly — on the order of a tablespoon of oil to a teaspoon of lemon juice for that amount — since a soaked nest will not stand up. None of this is in the original; adjust by eye.
- NeufchatelThe American cheese of this name is a soft fresh cheese in the cream-cheese family, not the bloomy-rind French Neufchâtel from Normandy; the modern US product is defined as lower in fat than cream cheese, though early domestic versions varied. Supermarket Neufchâtel or a firm cream cheese both work; chill it hard before shaping or it will not hold an egg form.
- Butter paddlesRidged wooden paddles, soaked in ice water, used to roll butter into balls and pats. Two chilled dessert spoons will quenelle the cheese into egg shapes just as well; the book specifies the smooth sides so the eggs come out unmarked.
- PaprikaSweet, mild paprika used for colour more than heat, as it generally was in American cookery of this period. Fleck it on at the last moment — it bleeds into the cheese and goes muddy if the plates sit.
- The silver knifePresumably broad-bladed so a narrow blade does not tear the nest, and silver because ordinary steel of the period discoloured and gave a metallic taste to acidic food. Any wide, flexible offset spatula serves the same purpose.
- Brown breadMost likely a plain wholemeal or graham loaf, sliced thin and buttered, rather than the steamed molasses Boston brown bread, though that appears elsewhere in books of this period. The recipe does not specify.
- Yield and servingOne nest per person as a luncheon salad course, three or four to a large platter with dressed lettuce filling the gaps. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep cold.
Bird's-nest salads belong to the golden age of the American ladies' luncheon, roughly 1890 to 1920, when the salad course was the place a hostess demonstrated ingenuity rather than appetite. Cookbooks of the period are full of these small edible tableaux — tomatoes cut into lilies, apples hollowed for mayonnaise, aspic moulded into rings — and they belong to a dining culture in which a plate was expected to be looked at before it was eaten. The nest form was a spring conceit, and spring is also when the first tender spinach came in. Neufchâtel's presence is a small marker of date: American dairies had been making a fresh cheese under that name since the late nineteenth century, and it was sold in foil-wrapped cakes and treated as a pantry staple for exactly this sort of moulded, tinted work.