Chop ½ pound of cold roast veal with ¼ pound of smoked salmon, 3 sour pickles, 2 sour apples, 1 large onion, some beans and capers and 3 hard-boiled eggs chopped fine. Add some chopped nuts. Season and pour over a mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with sliced beets and olives; serve cold.
May 16 — No. 16
Russian
A composed cold salad of the type once sold under the name salade russe — leftover roast meat, cured fish, pickles and eggs bound with mayonnaise. The proportions are forgiving; the technique is not, since everything depends on uniform dice and thorough chilling.
- Cut, don't mince"Chopped fine" here means an even small dice of roughly a quarter inch, not a paste. If the veal and apple break down, the salad turns to a grey spread and loses the point of it.
- Cold roast vealHalf a pound of leftover veal roast was a fair assumption in a period household kitchen. Poached or roasted chicken breast, turkey or lean pork loin substitutes without changing the character; the meat should be dry-cooked and firm, not braised.
- Smoked salmonQuarter of a pound of cold-smoked salmon is a lot against half a pound of veal, and along with the pickles and capers it brings most of the salt to the bowl. Hot-smoked salmon flakes rather than dices and gives a coarser result o salsalt.
- Sour pickles and sour apples"Sour pickles" are brined dill cucumbers, not sweet gherkins. "Sour apples" means a tart cooking variety — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy — and they go in raw. Toss the diced apple with a little of the mayonnaise or a squeeze of lemon immediately so it does not brown.
- "Some beans"Genuinely ambiguous. Either cooked green beans cut into short lengths or cooked white haricots would suit the dish, and there is nothing in the text to settle which was meant. About a cup of either, well drained and cooled, sits comfortably with the other quantities.
- The onionOne large raw onion will dominate half a pound of veal. A mild sweet onion or a couple of shallots is closer to the intended effect, and a five-minute soak of the dice in cold water takes off the harshness.
- Dressing and restingAround three-quarters of a cup of mayonnaise binds this without drowning it. Season after the mayonnaise goes in, not before, then chill at least two hours so the flavours settle — this is a salad that improves between making and serving.
- Beets lastAdd the sliced beets as garnish at the moment of serving. Mixed in early, they bleed and the whole bowl goes pink.
- YieldEnough for six as a first course or four as a lunch dish. Keep it refrigerated until it goes to table and return leftovers to the cold within two hours; a mayonnaise-bound meat salad is not a dish to leave standing on a buffet.
The name is a period label rather than a Russian one: by the late nineteenth century "Russian salad" or salade russe meant, across European and American kitchens, any cold mixture of diced cooked things bound with mayonnaise. Its origin is generally traced to Lucien Olivier, the proprietor and chef of the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow in the 1860s, whose luxurious version is said to have used game, crayfish and caviar; the recipe was reportedly never published, and what spread westward was the idea rather than the formula. What survives in this book is the practical descendant — an economical way to turn Sunday's cold roast into a dish with a foreign name, stretched with pickles, apple, egg and whatever beans were to hand. The smoked salmon and capers are the gesture toward the grand original. That such a collection should assign one salad to stand for an entire empire tells you how such books worked: a national label, a couple of signature ingredients, and dinner on the table.