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Nut and Celery Salad
Put one cupful of English walnuts 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 several pieces; mix with this an equal quantity of finely cut celery, moisten with mayonnaise and arrange on lettuce leaves; garnish with mayonnaise and dust with paprika. Large chestnuts may be boiled in slightly salted water, skinned and served in the same way.
A Waldorf-adjacent salad from the era when walnuts were routinely blanched to tame their skins. The blanching is the only fussy step, and it is optional.
- The blanching, and whether to botherTen minutes of boiling loosens the papery brown pellicle, which carries much of a walnut's tannic bitterness; the cold soak firms the nutmeat again. With fresher modern shelled walnuts the step is easily skipped, or the nuts dry-toasted at 350F for 8 minutes instead for better flavor and crunch. If you do blanch, dry the pieces thoroughly or the mayonnaise will slacken and weep.
- "English walnuts"The common walnut, Juglans regia — what any supermarket sells as walnuts. The term distinguished them from American black walnuts, which are far stronger and would overwhelm the celery.
- CeleryUse the pale inner ribs and peel any strings from the outer ones. Cut across into thin slices rather than lengthwise sticks so the pieces sit level with the nut pieces.
- MayonnaiseAt this date the dressing would ordinarily have been homemade, boiled or hand-beaten. Jarred mayonnaise works and is made with pasteurized egg; if you whisk your own for a salad that will not be cooked, use pasteurized eggs.
- The chestnut variationScore an X in the flat side of each chestnut before boiling, 20 to 25 minutes in salted water, and peel while still hot — both the shell and the inner skin come away cleanly then and stubbornly once cool. Chestnuts are starchy rather than oily, so the salad wants a slightly thinner dressing.
- PaprikaIn this period paprika in American cooking generally meant the sweet Hungarian sort, used for color as much as taste. Smoked Spanish paprika will read as out of place here.
- Yield and servingOne cup of nuts plus one cup of celery dresses four small salad plates. Assemble within an hour of serving; the celery weeps and the nuts soften if it stands.
Nut-and-celery salads belong to the great American salad boom of the 1890s and 1900s, a period that also saw the Waldorf Hotel's apple-celery-mayonnaise combination and the arrival of cheap commercial celery from the muck farms of Michigan and New York. Celery had shifted within a generation from an expensive centerpiece vegetable, served upright in a cut-glass celery vase, to something plentiful enough to chop into salads; the crisp-and-creamy formula that resulted — something crunchy, something rich, mayonnaise, a lettuce leaf, a dusting of paprika — became a common structure for printed salads. The blanching instruction is a period marker: nineteenth-century cookbooks often told readers to scald and skin walnuts and almonds, a habit generally traced to confectionery work and to the reality that shelled nuts were often stale by the time they reached a kitchen. Chestnuts appear as a substitute, though the reason for the swap is not recorded.