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French Vegetable Salad
Boil equal weights, separately, of the tender tips of asparagus, string beans, green peas, carrots and turnips. Dry them in a clean cloth, and when cold cut into small squares. These should be arranged on a dish, the beans in the bottom and center. Then, around them, in equal rows, the carrots, peas, turnips and, last, the asparagus. If there are vegetables enough, proceed as before, and over all sprinkle finely minced chervil, tarragon, burnet, chives and garden cress, all having been first blanched, strained, cooled and dried in a cloth. If you have not these, substitute others of a similar character. Serve with Mayonnaise sauce. If the vegetables are fresh, young and, of course, tender, it makes a delicious dish.
A cold composed vegetable salad of the type French cooks called macédoine. The recipe assumes you know how to boil vegetables and concerns itself with the arrangement, so the practical work is in the timing and the drying.
- Cook separately, and undercookThe whole point of "separately" is that carrots, turnips, beans and peas all need different times, and asparagus tips need only a few minutes. Boil each in salted water until just yielding, then shock in ice water so the colours hold.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Any surface water thins the mayonnaise into a puddle at the bottom of the dish. Spread the cut vegetables on a towel and leave them until genuinely dry to the touch.
- Equal weightsWeigh after trimming, not before — a bunch of asparagus loses most of its mass once the tips are cut off. For four to six people as a side, 4 oz (about 115 g) of each of the five vegetables is a workable quantity.
- Cut cold, not warmThe instruction to cut into squares only when cold is deliberate. Warm vegetables crumble at the edges and the dice will not hold their shape in the concentric rings.
- Burnet and garden cressSalad burnet has a cucumber flavour and is now mostly a herb-garden plant; garden cress is the sprouted Lepidium sativum sold as cress, not watercress. Parsley, dill and the green tops of spring onions do the job if neither is at hand, which is essentially what the recipe's own escape clause allows.
- Blanching the herbsA few seconds in boiling water and straight into cold sets the colour and takes the raw edge off chervil and tarragon. Dry them as thoroughly as the vegetables, or they will clump.
- The mayonnaiseServe it alongside rather than poured over, as the original implies, or the rings disappear. If you want it spoonable over a salad this wet-prone, slacken it with a little lemon juice or cream.
- Assemble lateThe rings can be laid out an hour or two ahead and refrigerated uncovered, but salt and dressing only at the table. Salted vegetables weep.
This is the macédoine de légumes of French professional cookery, a dish built on contrast of colour as much as flavour — the name is often said to derive from the idea of Alexander's Macedonian empire as a mixture of many peoples, though this is a traditional explanation rather than a demonstrated one. Dressed with mayonnaise and mounded rather than laid in rings, the combination is closely related to what is known across Europe as Russian salad, which conventionally adds potato and often meat. Its appearance in a household manual says something about ambition: the compiler expects a home cook to have asparagus tips, chervil, tarragon, burnet and garden cress to hand, which meant a kitchen garden rather than a grocer. The closing line — that it is delicious if the vegetables are fresh, young and tender — is the honest part, and still the whole of the matter.