Home › Sauces, Salads, Pickles and Condiments › Salad of Meat, Fowl or Fish
Salad of Meat, Fowl or Fish
The cooked cold meat, chicken, game, fish or lobster, is to be cut into small scallops or pulled to pieces, and dipped into Mayonnaise sauce, and the lettuce well blanched as well as the endive. Prepare these and water-cress by washing and drying in a cloth. Break into pieces of an inch in length. Mince a sprig of chervil, two leaves of tarragon and a little sorrel. Peel and slice a fresh cucumber and a boiled red beet. Mix all these together thoroughly, make a foundation of the vegetables, then a layer of the fish, flesh or fowl, etc. So continue until you have the whole complete, saving some cucumber and beet-root for the outside of the dish. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs, properly cut; also, with jelly or olives. Serve with Mayonnaise sauce, from a boat or other suitable vessel.
A composed layered salad in the French manner, written for a cook who already has cold roast meat and a bowl of mayonnaise on hand. Two words in it mean something other than what a modern reader expects.
- "Blanched" lettuce is not boiledIn this period blanching a salad plant meant growing or storing it in the dark so the leaves stay pale and mild — the same sense as blanched endive. Use the pale inner hearts of romaine or Bibb; do not put lettuce in hot water.
- Endive means Belgian endive or curly friséeEndive here most likely means curly endive or escarole rather than Belgian endive, which was a later arrival. Frisée gives the bitter edge; if you use Belgian endive instead it adds crispness, and a mix is a reasonable modern reading.
- Sorrel and chervilA little sorrel is deliberate — it is sharply acidic and a large handful will overwhelm the mayonnaise. If sorrel is unavailable, a scrape of lemon zest plus a few extra tarragon leaves approximates the effect; chervil can be replaced with flat parsley and a pinch of tarragon.
- Dress the meat, not the greensThe hinge of the recipe: the protein is tossed in mayonnaise first and the greens stay dry. Dressing the leaves as well turns the layers to paste. Extra sauce is passed separately in a boat.
- Keep the beet apart until the endSliced boiled beet will bleed pink through mayonnaise and lettuce within minutes. Add it to the reserved garnish and to the layers at the last moment, or the whole dish goes uniformly magenta.
- Cut the meat small"Scallops" here means thin flat slices; pulling chicken or lobster into shreds gives more surface for the sauce. Roughly 1 lb of cooked meat or fish to 8-10 oz of prepared greens is a workable ratio.
- Homemade mayonnaiseThe mayonnaise this book assumes is raw-yolk. If you make it rather than buying it, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated — cold cooked meat and fish dressed in emulsion should not stand at room temperature.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Scaled as suggested above it fills a large shallow serving dish and would serve six to eight as a luncheon course. Assemble no more than an hour ahead.
This is the standard nineteenth-century salade of the French service as it reached American household books through Anglo-French cookery writing: a base of dressed leaves and herbs, a layer of cold cooked flesh, and a border of sliced cucumber and beet, with hard-boiled egg and jelly for the garnish. Its purpose in a book like this is thrift as much as elegance — the salad is where Monday's cold roast, the remains of a boiled fowl, or a single lobster went, dignified by mayonnaise and a careful arrangement. The call for chervil, tarragon and sorrel suggests a French formula rather than a homegrown one; those herbs were kitchen-garden staples in France and less commonly found in American markets.