Veal Salad
Boil a veal cutlet with a little salt until tender; pick to pieces. Make a dressing of three tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one teaspoonful sugar, onehalf saltspoonful salt, a little cayenne and made mustard; put this on the fire and let come to a boil, then pour gradually over the yolks of two wellbeaten eggs; let this cook until thick, stirring all the time; when cool, beat in two tablespoonfuls of cream. Mix half of the dressing with the veal and put in a cool place. Have ready some nice lettuce torn in shreds, and just before serving mix with the veal, and put in a dish with some nice, crisp lettuce leaves. Pour over the salad the remainder of the dressing. Delicious. HERRING SALAD (GERMAN). -Mrs. E. H. Boice.
Four pounds of roasted veal; boil five large beets, let them get cold; boil six good-sized potatoes, allow them to get cold. One dozen German herrings, put them in cold water for twelve hours. These ingredients to be prepared the day before. Cut veal into small pieces, do not hash it; same with beets, potatoes and herrings. Mix well, having sliced up a hard apple and one small onion, to be put into the salad; season to taste with salt and pepper, serve with oil and vinegar; decorate with hard-boiled eggs, beets and potatoes. -Mrs. Langston.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a veal salad with a cooked dressing, and Mrs. Boice's German herring salad that follows the stray heading. Both are cold composed salads built on leftover or purpose-cooked veal.
- The hinge: temper the yolksPouring the boiling vinegar mixture into the yolks in a thin stream, whisking hard, is what keeps this from scrambling. Then cook it over low heat or a bain-marie until it coats a spoon, and pull it off before it looks fully thick, as it sets further as it cools.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful is an eighth of a teaspoon. Taste and adjust; the dressing should read sharp, since the bland veal absorbs a lot of it.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard means prepared mustard from the jar rather than dry powder. A teaspoon of a plain Dijon or English mustard is the right register here.
- Boiling the cutletA veal cutlet is lean and will toughen if held at a rolling boil. Bring it to a bare simmer in salted water and hold it there 25-40 minutes depending on thickness, then let it cool in its liquid before shredding so it does not dry out.
- Cream, not whippedThe two tablespoons of cream go in cold and unwhipped, to loosen the cooled dressing. If it has set too stiff, thin it with a spoonful of the veal cooking liquid.
- Yield and assemblyThe original gives no yield; a single cutlet with dressing will stretch to three or four as a first course at most. Keep the lettuce separate until the moment of serving, as the original insists; shredded lettuce collapses in vinaigrette quickly.
- Herring salad: the soakThe twelve-hour soak in cold water points to salt-cured herring rather than vinegar-pickled, the soak being a desalting step. Soak them in the refrigerator with a change or two of water, and taste a scrap before mixing; over-salted herring will dominate four pounds of veal.
- Herring salad: proportions and finishFour pounds of roast veal to a dozen herrings, five beets and six potatoes feeds a crowd of twelve or more. Cutting rather than hashing matters for texture, and the beets will bleed pink through everything if mixed too far ahead, so combine shortly before serving and dress with oil and vinegar at the table.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings of this kind, thickened with egg yolk and sharpened with vinegar and mustard, were an American household answer to mayonnaise, and they turn up throughout late nineteenth-century community cookbooks in salads of chicken, veal, cabbage and potato. The herring salad that follows belongs to a different tradition entirely: Heringssalat, the beet-and-herring salad of German and Central European kitchens, served at Christmas and New Year and often carried into Midwestern American cooking by German immigrant households. Its appearance under a contributor's name, alongside the note "(GERMAN)," is typical of community cookbooks, which collected recipes from the women of a town and preserved the ethnic mix of the community along with them.