Take the inner lettuce leaves; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Mix the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs with 1 tablespoonful of olive-oil and stir all together with 2 tablespoonfuls of white wine vinegar. Serve at once with meats.
A dressing built on hard-boiled egg yolk rather than raw, which makes it closer to a sauce gribiche than to a vinaigrette. The proportions as written are sharp, so taste before it reaches the table.
- The hinge: mash the yolks smooth firstWork the two cooked yolks to a paste with the oil before any vinegar goes in, or the dressing stays grainy and refuses to cling. A fork against the side of a bowl is enough.
- Oil to vinegarOne tablespoon oil to two of vinegar inverts the modern proportion, which usually runs about three parts oil to one of vinegar, so this will taste markedly sharp. If it bites, add oil a teaspoon at a time; the cooked yolk will carry more than the recipe allows.
- "Inner lettuce leaves"The pale heart of a head lettuce, not loose leaf. A Bibb, Boston or the heart of a romaine gives the crispness the dish depends on.
- White wine vinegarVinegar strength was not standardised in this period and would not necessarily match today's 5 to 6 percent product. Taste as you go and adjust.
- "Serve at once"Meant literally. Salted and dressed lettuce hearts weep within a few minutes and go limp. Dress at the table if you can.
- What to do with the whitesThe recipe uses only the yolks. Chop the whites fine and scatter them over the salad rather than discarding them.
- YieldEnough dressing for one good head of lettuce, serving two to four alongside a meat course.
Salads dressed with pounded hard-boiled yolk belong to an older European tradition than the emulsified vinaigrette most cooks now default to; the yolk acts as the binder, holding oil and vinegar together in the way mustard or a raw yolk does in mayonnaise. Calling the dish simply "French" reflects the logic of a book that assigns one dish per day to a nation: what makes it French here is less a regional origin than the nineteenth-century conviction, repeated in cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic, that the French alone understood how to dress a salad and to serve it undressed until the last moment. The instruction to serve it "with meats" places it in the period's usual running order, where salad accompanied or followed the roast rather than opening the meal.