Cut some celery, apples and truffles into fine shreds and mix with chrysanthemum flowers; season with salt and pepper. Put in a salad bowl and cover with a mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with chopped hard-boiled eggs and olives.
A composed salad of shreds and flowers, written in the telegraphic style of a chef's notebook: no quantities, no yield, and an assumption that the cook can judge proportions by eye. A few points will get it onto a plate.
- ProportionsNothing is measured. Equal volumes of celery and apple, with truffle as a scattering rather than an equal partner, gives a balanced bowl; roughly two cups of shredded celery and two of apple serves four.
- Chrysanthemum flowersOnly edible-grade blooms belong here, from a kitchen garden or a grower selling them for food. Florist chrysanthemums are routinely treated with pesticides not approved for consumption. Pull the petals from the bitter green base and use petals only.
- TrufflesIn a salad of this period, truffle would most often have been preserved truffle sold in small tins and sliced thin, though fresh black truffle is in season in March. A modern equivalent is a few grams of fresh or preserved black truffle shaved fine; truffle oil is a different flavour and will overpower the flowers.
- Shreds, not dice"Fine shreds" is the point of the dish, which is a julienne salad in the French manner dressed as a Japanese one. Cut celery on a long diagonal into matchsticks and the apple likewise; chunks turn it into a Waldorf.
- Keep the apple paleToss the shredded apple in lemon juice before it meets the dressing. The original says nothing about browning.
- The mayonnaiseA period cook made this fresh with raw yolks. If you do the same, use pasteurised eggs, or use a good bottled mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice so it coats the shreds instead of clumping.
- Assemble lateSalt draws water out of celery and apple within minutes and thins the dressing. Season, dress and garnish immediately before it goes to the table.
A dish called "Japanese" in a Western hotel kitchen might well be signalled by chrysanthemum petals, the flower being the imperial emblem of Japan and, after the opening of Japanese trade and the vogue for all things Japanese in late-Victorian design, an instantly legible shorthand. The actual technique here is thoroughly French: julienned celery, apple and tinned truffle bound in mayonnaise, garnished with sieved hard-boiled egg and olives, is a salad any classically trained chef of the period could have produced blindfolded. Edible chrysanthemum does have genuine standing in Japanese cooking, where petals appear as a garnish and the leaves of shungiku go into nabe and dressed vegetable dishes, so the borrowing is not baseless, merely thin. Books of this kind, offering one dish a day and a different nation each time, sold on exactly that promise of variety, and their national labels tell you more about what turn-of-the-century diners found exotic than about the cuisines named.