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Imperial Salad
Salt, pepper and cayenne to taste. Chop all together, and cover with mayonnaise dressing. Very nice.
What survives here is the tail end of a recipe: the seasoning, the assembly and the verdict, with the ingredient list missing. Anyone cooking from it is really reconstructing a period salad rather than following a set of directions.
- The missing halfThe text begins mid-recipe. Whatever was to be chopped — the defining part of the dish — is not on the page, so this cannot be followed as written without supplying your own components.
- What "Imperial Salad" usually meantWhat "Imperial Salad" might have contained -- Nothing on the page identifies the ingredients, and grand salad names of this kind were not fixed formulas. Any chopped mixed salad bound with mayonnaise will suit the seasoning and dressing given, but the original components cannot be recovered from this text.
- Chopped, not sliced"Chop all together" is the operative instruction: the components are cut small and mixed, rather than arranged as a composed platter. The recipe gives no size for the pieces.
- CayenneThe recipe leaves the amount to taste. Used sparingly it sharpens the mayonnaise rather than reading as heat in its own right.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe period dressing is a hand-beaten emulsion of raw egg yolk, oil, vinegar or lemon and mustard, considerably looser than jarred mayonnaise. If you make it with raw yolks, use very fresh eggs, keep the salad cold, and serve it the same day; pasteurised eggs remove the question entirely.
- Dressing the salad"Cover with mayonnaise dressing" suggests the dressing was spooned over the heaped salad rather than tossed through it, though the text does not say so outright. Chill the chopped mixture and dress it shortly before serving.
- YieldNo quantity or serving number is given.
Grand names attached to plain chopped salads were a fashion of the late nineteenth century, when American cookbooks borrowed the vocabulary of hotel and restaurant menus: Imperial, Royal, Victoria, Metropolitan. The names rarely denoted a fixed formula, and a dish called Imperial Salad in one book may share nothing with the next beyond mayonnaise and a chopping board. The compressed, telegraphic style of the entry \— seasoning, method, and a two-word review \— may reflect the crowded salad chapters of the period, where dozens of variations were packed onto a page and the writer assumed the reader already knew what mayonnaise dressing was.