Virginia Cookery-book

CHAPTER XIII. SALADS AND VEGETABLES COLD, Chicken Salad.— Lobster Salad.— Cold Slaw, No. 1.— Cold Slaw, No. 2.— Hot Slaw.— Sauce for Salmon or Lobster.- To Dress Lettuce without Oil. — Tomatoes Raw. — Cucumbers Raw. — Dressing for Lettuce.— Dressing for Lettuce or other Salad. — Another Salad Dressing. — Yet another Salad Dressing.— A Winter Salad. —Mayonnaise Salad Dressing.— Cabbage Salad.— Oyster Salad. Chicken Salad. In giving recipes for salads it is next to impossible to give precise quantities, especially when the great diversity of tastes is considered. We can only approximate precision for what we suppose to be the taste of a majority of the persons into whose hands this book will be likely to fall. On the Continent of Europe, for instance, olive oil and garlic are favorite ingredients in salads, while, more and more in our country, olive oil, or indeed, much fatty matter of any kind, is repugnant to popular taste. While physicians commend so highly as they do some admixture of fat or oil with food (for those with any tendency to pulmonary disease especially), it would seem the duty of the faithful house-keeper to seek to introduce it into her recipes in such a moderate and delicate fashion as should help the squeamish to overcome their prejudice against ^^ grease," and at the same time satisfy in some measure those of opposite taste. ^^ Jack Sprat and his wife" are still characters typical of the whole race, and skilful will she be who can so compound her salads as to make both parties agree that they are 7* 154 VIRGINIA COOKERY-BOOK. good. And yet this is the task that the salad-maker has before her, and, strange to say, she often succeeds in it. Cream helps her admirably over much debatable ground, her own ingenuity and good-sense over the rest. In the recipes here given we only seek humbly to strike a happy medium, leaving it for each individual to make special alterations as shall fit them to idiosyncrasies that she knows to exist in the taste of those for whom she caters. Two fowls will provide a dish of salad large enough for a family of from eight to twelve. If you cook them specially with the view of making salad, boil them very done, the water in which they are boiled, with the meat rejected from the salad, supplying an excellent tureen full of soup; but if you have cold roasted chickens left over from a dinner, they will answer very well. Joint your fowls, pull off every particle of skin, gristle, and fat, chopping up the lean parts of the flesh into pieces about the size of backgammon dice ; set it aside in a large, flat meat-dish until ready to mix it; have ready for this quantity the hard-boiled yolks of nine eggs, half a pint of olive oil that is perfectly sweet, or, where it is not liked, half a pint of rich cream, with a table-spoonful of creamed butter, a gill of vinegar, a gill of made mustard, a amall teaspoonful of red pepper, and a large one of salt ; chop up into pieces the same size as your chicken as much celery, or celery and lettuce mixed, as will make a quantity equal in bulk to the fowl. In the depth of winter, if neither celery nor lettuce are procurable, chop up a bleached head of cabbage, and use a teaspoonful of bruised celery-seed as a substitute for the usual vegetables required. Do not mix your salad long before it is needed, if you can help it. Add the vegetables to the fowl, pour over the salad dressing, and stir thoroughly with a wooden fork and spoon ; garnish with rings of white of egg and VIRGINIA COOKERY-BOOK. 155 green celery-leaves. Setve either ih a regular china saladdish or glass bowl. Lobster Salad.