table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Rescuing the Chopped Salad

(June 10, 2010)  Salad at our house in the 1950s was iceberg lettuce with bottled “French dressing.” Seasonally, tomato wedges were added. On special occasions we slathered on Thousand Island dressing, an awful-but-addictive concoction of mayonnaise, catsup and sweet pickle relish, a highlight of childhood memories of vegetables.

Mine was the age of Betty Crocker mixes and frozen foods, where food was something to be taken care of by Progress. The kitchen of the future would be programmed to make dinner. This was the world before Julia Child, when even Romaine was exotic, something you got in hotel dining rooms: “Hearts of Romaine Lettuce with Blue Cheese.”

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Thousand Island dressing was the modern housewife’s deconstruction of Russian dressing, the sauce invented to make the San Francisco Palace Hotel’s famous Crab Louis (similar ingredients, but adding minced scallion and pimiento — all solids are then strained out, leaving a silken, tangy pink essence).

Mama didn’t like to cook, but for company, there might be another filtered-through-the-fifties famous dish, Waldorf Salad, with Best Foods mayonnaise straight from the jar, served on a lettuce leaf. (Iceberg, of course. What else was there?) Created at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1896, the original version of Waldorf Salad contained only chopped apples, celery and mayonnaise (walnuts were added later). An inspired combination, I think.

The mayonnaise referred to, however, is not our supermarket kind, but sauce mayonnaise, a flavored emulsion of olive oil and egg yolk. This is something most people have never tasted, and it’s an entirely different genre. You can make it at home, with practice, better and cheaper than Best Foods. Except who would have done that back then? And even today, as Wikipedia notes, “Mayonnaise made this way may taste strong or sharp to people accustomed to commercial products.” Indeed.

The Waldorf was a forerunner of a largely forgotten meme of the ’50s, the chopped salad. (Mama didn’t make these — they were labor-intensive, and she regarded cooking as one of the endless checklists of the household, along with vacuuming and laundry.) These concoctions were particularly popular for ladies’ luncheons, but they showed up at festive occasions, pot-lucks and picnics. They were characterized by uniformly sized fresh raw and canned vegetables bound by a thin mayonnaise. A typical recipe would be head lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, celery and green onions.

Food blogger Sally Schneider recalls, “My mother used to make a chopped salad that was on the menu at New York’s glamorous 21 Club: a dice of carrots, celery, cucumbers, tomato, onion and peppers tossed with Russian dressing and, like a wonderful prize in the midst of it all, little bits of American cheese.”

Those are “glamorous” exceptions. They are not the reality of ’50s food in the U.S. No wonder people my age remember being told, “Eat your vegetables,” like it was a dreaded duty. It was! Aside from tomatoes, what comes to mind are frozen peas and carrots, mushy green beans and squash, and canned goods. I actually was fond of canned spinach; when I first tried frozen, it tasted bitter. I would be 20 years old before I discovered what fresh spinach tasted like.

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