My idea of good food is a vegetable salad. Any kind of a vegetable
salad is good; some are better than others. Here is a recipe for a
French dressing on a lettuce salad which you should try on your meat
grinder, or your potato masher, or your rolling pin or whatever kitchen
utensil you can play.
Get a crisp head of lettuce, discard the outer green leaves, using
the inner yellow and white. Wash it thoroughly, and after pulling it
apart dry each leaf with a tea towel. Put it in a big bowl—a big mixing
bowl, six inches deep anyway. Then set that to one side, and get about
as much onion as the end of your first finger would make, if it was
chopped off at the second joint. Mince that. Put it in the bottom of a
bowl. Take a large tablespoon; put in salt and paprika to taste, and
don’t be afraid of making it salty, then add oil and vinegar, about
three or four to one, mixing them in the spoon until it slops over
into the onion, and then stir the salt and paprika and oil and vinegar
down into the bowl of minced onion, taking a salad fork and jabbing it
around in the mixture until the onion has been fairly well crushed and
the onion flavor permeates the mixed oil and vinegar, and the salt and
paprika have become for the moment a part of the mass. Don’t let it
stand a second, but pour it quickly into the bowl of dry lettuce, and
then stir like the devil. Keep on stirring; stir some more, and serve
as quickly as possible.
Cheese may be mashed into the onion before putting on the oil and
vinegar and paprika and salt. If one wants to add tomatoes, wait until
the last three jabs of the stirring fork into the lettuce, and then
quarter the tomatoes and turn them in just before you turn the lettuce
over the last two or three times. This is done so that the watery juice
of the tomatoes won’t get smeared over the oil on the lettuce leaves.
If you stir the tomatoes in early, you get a runny, watery, gooey mess.
Cucumbers may be added, and they should be stirred in rather earlier
than the tomatoes in the business of mixing the lettuce leaves and the
dressing. Green peppers may be added if they are cut into strings, but
too much outside fixings spoils the salad for me. The tomatoes are
about as far as one can go wisely.