Home › Salads › Midwinter Salad
Midwinter Salad
One head of lettuce, two lemons, three apples, one cupful of finely sliced celery; pare the apples and cut them in half inch squares, do the same with the lemons, but cut finer, use a very sharp knife, and be sure to remove every trace of the bitter white rind; mix with the celery, marinate with a French dressing and let stand half an hour. Heap on the cleaned and dried lettuce and spread over a little mayonnaise.
A straightforward winter salad built on the three things a nineteenth-century larder still had in February: apples, celery and citrus. Two details in the wording need unpacking before you start.
- "Cut the lemons in squares"This means peeled flesh, not slices with rind attached. Cut off the peel and every scrap of white pith with a sharp knife as instructed, then cut the segments free of the membranes and chop them small. Any pith left behind will make the whole bowl bitter.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot a sweet orange-coloured bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked. Given the lemon already in the salad, go light on the acid in the dressing.
- Keeping the apples paleHalf-inch cubes of pared apple will brown within minutes. Cut them directly into the lemon flesh and its juice, or toss with a spoonful of lemon juice as you go. A firm, tart variety holds its shape through the half-hour marinade; a mealy one collapses.
- The half-hour standThis is doing real work — the celery softens slightly and the dressing draws juice from the apple. Refrigerate it, and drain off the pooled liquid before heaping the salad onto the lettuce, or the leaves will go limp.
- CeleryA cupful finely sliced is about two large ribs. Strip the coarse strings from the outer stalks first; inner ribs and the pale heart need no peeling.
- The mayonnaise"A little" is meant literally — a thin spoonful spread over the top as a garnish, not a bound dressing. If your mayonnaise is stiff, thin it with a little lemon juice or cream so it drapes rather than sits.
- YieldRoughly four to six as a side salad, or two to three as a lunch course. It does not keep; dress and serve the same day.
Salads like this one are a winter expedient, and the name says so plainly. Before reliable year-round produce, the salad course between December and March had to be assembled from what stored well — apples out of the barrel or cellar, celery banked in sand or trenched in the garden, and lemons, which arrived by ship and kept for weeks. Celery carried a degree of prestige in American households of the late nineteenth century: it was labour-intensive to grow and was often served upright in a dedicated glass vase on the table, though by the 1890s it was grown widely enough to be within reach of ordinary households. The combination of apple, celery and a mayonnaise finish is the same line of thinking that produced the Waldorf salad, usually attributed to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s; the lemon flesh here in place of nuts gives a sharper, cleaner result than the walnut version that became famous.