On April 21, 1906, the Wilkes-Barre Times of Wilkes-Barre, PA, offered suggestions for St. Patrick’s Day that were almost exclusively based around color green. Green domino masks! Sandwiches bound with green ribbon! Green streamers! Green candles! Pistachio ice cream!
They did, however, also suggest a recipe that frankly
sounds delicious. They called it an Emerald Salad, and, in their conception, it
is made in this way:
Emerald Salad—Cut tops from green peppers; remove every particle of seed and membrane; let stand in salt water for an hour; then wipe dry and fill with the following, which has stood in dressing for twelve hours; cut one pint cold boiled potatoes into small dice; add enough thinly sliced cucumbers or pickles chopped to measure one-third more; then fill up measure with thinly sliced celery; season with pepper, salt if needed, and onion juice. Place a pimolas on top of each pepper, which is stood in a cup made of lettuce.
“Pimolas” is a stuffed olive, especially one stuffed with
pimento, by the way.
This wasn’t the first appearance of the emerald salad, by
the way. The Trenton Evening Times had printed an almost identical recipe
(identifying the salad dressing as French), just as fetishistically green,
three years earlier. But the Wilkes-Barre
authors connected it with St. Paddy’s, and that’s where it would continue to
appear. As an example: The Margaret Ellen Tea Room in Lexington, KY, offered
Emerald Salad as part of a 1915 St. Patrick’s
lunch that also included cream potatoes, shamrock rolls, and pistachio cream.
The Bay City Times offered their own version in 1918:
Emerald Salad—Mix lightly together a can of French peas, very green in color, and 2-3 of a cupful of green pepper chopped fine. Toss lightly with a little mayonnaise dressing and serve on a lettuce leaf with small cheese balls made of fresh cottage cheese mixed with cream and rolled in chopped pistachio nuts.
Another, decidedly non-vegetarian version appeared in the
Rockford Republican in 1926. This involved a goose liver, boiled, chopped, and worked
into a paste with a packet of cream cheese. Pepper, salt, sugar and Worcester sauce is added to the liver, along with a chopped sweet pickle and onion juice.
Then sweet cream is added, just enough so that the paste can be molded into
little balls, which are then served in lettuce leaves and garnished with
olives.
I won’t be trying that one. I might try the following,
however; as a native Minnesotan, the idea of a Jello salad is not as odious to
me as it might be to those who have never seen vegetables floating in gelatin.
The recipe is from the Oregonian from March of 1951, which seems to be the
epicenter of Jello salads. The recipe is as follows:
EMERALD SALAD1 package lime gelatin1 cup boiling water1 cup pineapple juice½ cup diced grapefruit1 cup crushed drained pineapple½ cup diced marshmallows½ cup diced emerald cherriesDissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add pineapple juice and cool until mixture begins to thicken. Fold in remaining ingredients and chill until form.
You may have noticed something about these recipes: The
first few started with potato, which made it, at least ostensibly, a little bit
like something people might actually have eaten in Ireland. This newer menu, however,
was squarely as American as a recipe could get. Marshmallows! Pineapple! In
some ways, this recipe is the most fully Irish-American in the group: It’s just
like any dessert that you would make on any occasion, except green, because
green means Irish.
By the 1970s, things had deteriorated further. The word
“emerald salad” exclusively showed up in announcements for special St. Patrick’s Day school lunches, such as the following,
from Marietta, GA:
“St. Patrick’s Day Leprechaun Lunch with chili dog on bun, crispy Irish potatoes, emerald salad, shamrock cake, orange juice, and milk.”
I’m going to go ahead and wager that this was just a typical
daily meal, with the Irish potatoes being everyday French fries, the emerald
salad consisting of limp lettuce and cucumbers, and the shamrock cake
distinguished merely by green frosting. I seem to recall eating this sort of
thing in the 70s, and being depressed about it.
Honestly, the first option is the most appealing to me. I
don’t think it needs to be as compulsively green as it is, and I am not
convinced the olives at the top are a good idea, but the idea of mixing up
vegetables and potatoes and serving them in a green pepper seems fundamentally
sound to me. I’d probably experiment with a variation of a common Irish pub
salad, which typically includes sliced hard-boiled eggs, cheddar or blue
cheese, and a dressing made of mayonnaise, vinegar, tarragon and Dijon mustard.
Then again, I might just go for the Jello. I’m Minnesota
Irish, after all, and we can barely resist a green salad.
