Mix 2 dozen cooked oysters with 3 truffles, and 2 cooked potatoes cut into shreds; season with salt and pepper. Add all kinds of chopped herbs, and moisten with white wine. Line the salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves; fill with the mixture; sprinkle with finely chopped parsley. Pour over a mayonnaise dressing and garnish with anchovy fillets.
A composed oyster salad of the French service tradition, despite the name. The only tricky element is the oysters, which need the lightest possible cooking.
- Cook the oysters barely at allTwo dozen shucked oysters need one to two minutes in their own liquor, just until the edges ruffle. Anything approaching a real simmer turns them to erasers, and no dressing will disguise it.
- YieldTwo dozen oysters and two potatoes would likely serve about four as a first course, or two as a light lunch.
- PotatoesUse a waxy variety — fingerling, red-skinned, or Yukon Gold — boiled whole in their skins, cooled, then peeled and cut into matchsticks. Floury baking potatoes shred into mush once dressed.
- TrufflesThree truffles is a luxury the book takes for granted. A small jar of preserved truffle peelings, drained, is the honest substitute; truffle oil is a different flavour altogether and overwhelms the oysters.
- "All kinds of chopped herbs"This may be taken as the familiar fines herbes mix: parsley, chervil, chives, tarragon. Tarragon is the one that carries, so keep it to a modest amount.
- Moisten with white wineA tablespoon or two of dry white wine over the warm oysters and potatoes, left ten minutes, is probably enough. It is a seasoning step, not a marinade — too much wine and the mayonnaise will slacken and separate on contact.
- SaltOysters, anchovy fillets and mayonnaise all bring salt. Season the mixture lightly and taste after the dressing goes on, not before.
- MayonnaiseIf you make it by hand it will contain raw egg; use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone who should avoid that. Thin it with a spoonful of the oyster liquor so it pours rather than sits in a lump.
The name tells you more about the period than about China. Cookbooks of the period routinely attached national labels to composed salads on the strength of a single ingredient, a garnish, or nothing at all — "Russian" meant diced vegetables in mayonnaise, and "Chinese" here seems to rest on the shredded potato and perhaps a general sense of the exotic. The dish itself is thoroughly French in method: everything cooked separately, cooled, bound with mayonnaise, and built in a lettuce-lined bowl in the manner of salades composées. Oysters were also relatively cheap and plentiful in the period, and a book aiming at a dish for every day of the year could call for two dozen cooked oysters in a salad without comment.