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Cheese Salad (Cut into tiny squares)
Cut into tiny squares a quarter of a pound of mild American cheese, mix it with one pint of finely sliced celery; turn into the salad bowl and pour over it a German salad dressing.
A two-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the dressing named but not given. Everything else is knife work.
- "Mild American cheese"In a book of this vintage this means a mild factory cheddar, not the processed slice that later took the name. Buy a young orange or white cheddar, or a mild Colby; a quarter pound is 4 oz, which cubes to roughly a cup.
- A pint of celeryThe celery is measured by volume after slicing, not by weight: a pint is two cups of thin crosswise slices, about four to five ribs from the heart. Use the pale inner stalks and their leaves; outer ribs are stringy and need peeling.
- German salad dressingThe recipe names a dressing it does not give. German-style dressings in cookbooks of this kind are generally built on vinegar with sugar, sometimes thickened with egg yolk and cream or bound with mustard, rather than a plain oil vinaigrette. A sour-cream-and-vinegar dressing or a mustardy vinaigrette both suit the cheese; skip anything mayonnaise-heavy, which will smother it.
- Cut size"Tiny squares" means the cheese and celery should meet on the fork in the same bite, so roughly quarter-inch dice. Cold cheese cubes more cleanly than cheese at room temperature.
- Dress at the tableCelery softens once it sits in an acid dressing. Combine, chill the bowl, and pour the dressing over just before serving.
- YieldRoughly three cups dressed, which is four small side portions or two as a light lunch course with bread.
Cheese and celery are an old pairing from the cheese course, where celery was served raw alongside cheddar or Stilton as a palate cleanser; American cookbooks of the period moved the two into a salad bowl. "American cheese" at this date was a descriptive term for domestic factory-made cheddar, and it appears frequently in period recipes as a cheap, dependable, mild cheese. Dressings were often catalogued by nationality in these books - French, German, Italian - with the German type generally sweeter and sharper than the French oil-and-vinegar.