I love salad, and when I make it at home, I add all sorts of ingredients as well as the conventional lettuce, cucumber, celery, tomato etc. Fruit, nuts, seeds, cubes of cheese, cubes of stale bread or old toast (I don’t mean vintage toast, I mean toast which didn’t get eaten at breakfast) Some of my concoctions are more successful than others, I sometimes discover some really great combinations unexpectedly.. However, I don’t think I can match some of the strange salad combinations in old cookery books; I’ve been back looking at Modern Practical Cookery, published late 1920’s early ’30’s and have found some very curious mixtures!
- apple, banana and ginger salad – with lettuce, celery and salad cream
- banana and celery salad – with salad cream
- cooked cauliflower salad – several versions, including with hard-boiled eggs, capers and pimentos, or with prawns hard-boiled eggs, tomato and beetroot, or with just parsley, or just parsley and Worcester sauce
- cherry salad – with lettuce, grapefruit
- Danish salad – cooked macaroni, celery, beetroot, capers, hard-boiled egg and salad cream, grapefruit segments, lettuce and French dressing served in grapefruit skins
- fig salad – dried figs, preserved ginger and syrup, cucumber, celery, salad cream, cress and boiled rice
- mayonnaise of peas and rice – what it says!
- tongue mayonnaise salad – plus beetroot, hard-boiled eggs, watercress and minced celery
I can’t say I am tempted by any but some of the ingredients appeal to me – I’ve never used ginger in a salad but it’s one of my favourite things.
Lois Elsden 