Snobby Salads for a Change

In case the statue and the classy title The Art of Salad Making (Carol Truax, copyright 1968, Bantam edition 1972) isn't enough of a tip-off that this is not one of those salad cookbooks that prominently features marshmallows, ruffles of piped-on mayo, and ingredients (not so) subtly dyed with food coloring, perhaps the foregrounded dark, leafy greens with carefully-arranged toppings taking precedence over the small salad mold (dark rather than neon-bright) will make the point clearer. Truax is more serious about salad-making than a lot of late '60s cooks seemed to be. My favorite part of the book just might be a passage in the introduction where the author recounts her attempts to avoid being served "the banana special"-- a salad someone thought would be of interest to a famous cookbook author. Truax says, "When I saw it, I thought it was an oversized caterpillar; but it turned out to be a whole banana drenched in honey and rolled-- believe it or not-- in cornflakes." Oh, I can definitely believe it. I've been reading old cookbooks for years now! I wouldn't have been surprised it if the cook had completed the caterpillar illusion with raisin eyes, a maraschino cherry mouth, and a series of legs made out of slivered almonds (or maybe toothpicks if the cook wasn't too concerned whether all the decorations should be edible). Truax tried to keep her composure right up to the point when the cook attempted to force the recipe on her, at which point, she says, she "lost it." (I hope that means she laughed, and not that she barfed.)

In any case, the recipes in this collection tend to be more focused on higher-end ingredients, so they could very well be beyond the budgets of the banana special crowd.

Sure, if the lobster is "terribly expensive," the cook can switch it out for extra shrimp or salmon, but Bouillabaisse Salad is always going to call for at least three pounds of seafood. It's not really in the same league as the salads I'm used to reading about.

Not being as confined by a budget as the cooks for many other books meant that Truax felt freer to include more international recipes with specialized ingredients. I have no idea how authentically Cambodian this recipe is...

...but I don't see many litchi (more commonly spelled lychee) recipes in my other cookbooks from the 1960s.

Truax also included a ceviche recipe well before it was as mainstream as it is now.

I'm not entirely convinced that half a bottle of catsup is a traditional part of the marinade, but her readers were unlikely to have much of a point of reference. (To be fair, my only real points of reference are cooking contest shows where someone is apt to try to make ceviche out of random seafood and lemon dessert bars, so I could be wrong here.)

The author has a few tics, though. If she wanted something to feel a little different from usual, she'd randomly throw in grapes.

I've never had green beans and asparagus and thought, "You know what would make this better? Grapes!" Truax apparently thought about adding grapes waaaay more often than I ever would.

And of course, she had to have some gelatin salad molds. It is a salad book after all. If you taste one of her aspics, it might be able to taste you back!

She differentiates her gelatin-based salads from the common ones not only by the cost of the materials, but also by including ingredients that kids would not want to eat.

Alternatively, if the kids might like the ingredients, she just makes the molded salads "serious" by adding alcohol.

It's an interesting salad book, to be sure, and one full of recipes that I would never make for slightly different reasons than the standard objections for my Midwest church cookbook recipes.