Year after year, Mary Smith prepared Christmas dinners along a traditional line. Ham, green beans, creamed potatoes with peas, biscuits, and mince and pumpkin pies.
And for the better part of two decades, the laborious Waldorf salad.
Perhaps you know it -- chopped apples, celery and walnuts, with mayonnaise, served chilled. Invented by the maitre d' of New York's Waldorf Hotel at the turn of the last century.
Mary's version -- actually the recipe of her mother, Lizzie, who even kept a decorative just-for-Waldorf-salad bowl in the china cabinet -- included grapes, whip cream as well as mayo, and pecans instead of walnuts.
And it took forever to make.
Of course it would, if you started with pecans in the shell. Washed and chopped a dozen red delicious apples. Whipped your own cream. And -- no kidding -- sliced each grape in half and used the paring knife to remove four seeds.
But that is how her mother made it, and Mary felt duty-bound to do the same.
One year, the busy hospital
