Green Salads
Escarole endive, chicory, corn salad, lettuce and water cress. After washing carefully, it is best to let the greens stand in cold water for about twenty minutes to restore crispness, then dry carefully on a towel. Dinner salads usually consist of any one of the various greens arranged in a dish or salad bowl, and a French dressing is added, either at the table or the last thing before serving.
A method note rather than a formula: the whole of it is washing, crisping and dressing. Two details carry the result.
- The cold soakTwenty minutes in cold water genuinely does revive limp leaves — the cells take up water and turn turgid again. Ice water works faster, and a refrigerated soak is safest for leaves that will sit out on a warm table.
- Dry thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Dressing will not cling to wet leaves; it slides off and pools at the bottom of the bowl. A towel works, a salad spinner works better, and leaves can be rolled loosely in a cloth and chilled for an hour before serving.
- Escarole and chicoryThe text's opening item may be a single name, 'escarole endive', rather than two greens. In period American usage 'chicory' commonly meant curly endive (frisée), and 'endive' could mean either the curly type or the blanched Belgian chicons. These are bitter enough that they take a sharper, more mustardy dressing than lettuce does.
- Corn saladAlso sold as mâche or lamb's lettuce. It is mild, tender and sandy — wash it in several changes of water and dress it very lightly, since the leaves bruise under a heavy hand.
- WatercressBuy cultivated cress rather than gathering it wild; wild-gathered cress from unknown water carries a real parasite risk. Trim the coarse lower stems.
- French dressingIn this period the term means simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion — not the sweetened orange-red bottled product that later took the name in the United States.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction to add dressing at the table is not ceremony. Salt and acid draw water out of the leaves within minutes and the salad collapses.
- QuantityThe recipe specifies none. As a modern guide, a large head of lettuce or escarole, or about 8 oz of loose leaves, will serve four as a dinner salad, with roughly 3 tablespoons of dressing.
Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks often distinguished the "dinner salad" described here — plain greens, French dressing, served alongside or after the meat course — from the elaborate composed salads of the same era, which involved mayonnaise, moulded gelatine, canned fruit and a great deal of garnish. The list of greens is itself a period document: escarole, chicory and corn salad were familiar to European kitchens and to market gardeners near the big cities, while watercress was widely sold and widely eaten. The insistence on the cold soak suggests greens that often reached the kitchen already wilted.