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Cheese and Celery Salad
Cut blanched celery stalks into small pieces, add half the bulk of Edam cheese broken or cut into bits, dress with French dressing, turn into a salad bowl lined with leaves of lettuce. Serve with bread and butter sandwiches.
A three-ingredient salad that depends entirely on the quality of the celery and the sharpness of the dressing. The two terms most likely to mislead a modern reader are "blanched" and "French dressing."
- "Blanched celery" is not cookedCelery of this period was earthed up or boarded in the field so the stalks grew pale, tender and mild. The instruction describes the celery you buy, not a step you perform. Use the pale inner stalks of the head and keep them raw and crisp.
- French dressing means vinaigrettePeriod French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, commonly two to three parts oil to one of vinegar depending on the source. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in the United States.
- The proportion"Half the bulk" is by volume, not weight: two cups of cut celery to one cup of cheese. Edam is dense, so a cup of cheese bits weighs considerably more than a cup of celery.
- Edam and its substitutesEdam is a mild, firm, faintly salty Dutch cheese, commonly sold for export in a red wax coat. The recipe allows either breaking or cutting it into bits. A young Gouda or a mild white cheddar behaves similarly.
- Dress at the last momentSalt and vinegar draw water from celery within minutes. Combine, dress and serve straight away, or the bowl fills with thin liquid and the stalks lose their snap.
- The lettuce is a linerWhole leaves are arranged in the bowl as a cup for the salad, not tossed through it. Butterhead or a soft leaf lettuce sits in a bowl better than crisp romaine.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; at the volumes suggested above, roughly enough for four as a side salad, or two as the light supper the bread-and-butter sandwiches imply.
Cheese salads of this kind belong to the moment when celery moved from an expensive centrepiece vegetable to an everyday one. Through much of the nineteenth century blanched celery was displayed upright in tall cut-glass vases on American tables as a mark of the season and the host's means; by the time this book appeared it was common enough to be chopped into a bowl. Edam, with its protective wax coat, belongs to the same shift. The suggestion to serve with bread-and-butter sandwiches places the dish at luncheon or a light supper rather than as a course in a full dinner, a pattern typical of the salad chapters in turn-of-the-century cookbooks.