Home › Salads › Sidney Smith's Winter Salad
Sidney Smith's Winter Salad
Two large potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve, Unwonted softness to the salad give; Of mordant mustard add a single spoon- Distrust the condiment which bites too soon; But deem it not, though made of herbs, a fault To add a double quantity of salt; Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, And once with vinegar procured from town.
True flavor needs it, and your poet begs The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole; And lastly, on the favored compound toss A magic tea-spoon of anchovy sauce.
Then, though green turtle fail, though venison 's tough, Though ham and turkey are not boiled enough, Serenely full, the epicure shall say, "Fate can not harm me-I have dined to day."
The verse is a working formula for a salad dressing, not a garnish for the page: sieved potato and pounded egg yolk stand in for the raw-egg emulsion of a mayonnaise. Read it as a list and it comes out at roughly a cup of dressing.
- The spoon is unmarkedThe poem asks for "a single spoon" of mustard, three of oil and one of vinegar without ever saying what size is meant. The closing "magic tea-spoon" may point to small measures, but a bare "spoon" in period recipes is often a tablespoon, and with two large potatoes to dress the larger reading is at least as likely. The ratio matters more than the absolute size: keep 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar and work up from a spoon of mustard.
- Mordant mustardSmith means sharp, biting mustard. The warning that follows -- "distrust the condiment which bites too soon" -- reads naturally as a caution about freshly wetted English mustard powder, which turns fierce within minutes and then fades. Mix it and let it stand a few minutes before judging the heat, or use a smooth prepared mustard.
- Oil of LuccaLucca in Tuscany was the standard source of good table olive oil in nineteenth-century Britain, and "oil of Lucca" was shorthand for the best grade available. Any decent, mild extra-virgin olive oil answers; a bitter, peppery new-harvest oil will fight the mustard.
- Salt"A double quantity of salt" against a teaspoon of mustard is a great deal by modern palates, especially with anchovy sauce also going in. Start with a quarter of it and correct at the end.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled sauce of anchovy, vinegar and spice, once as common as ketchup and now scarce. About half a teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a little vinegar, or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire, gives the same half-suspected savour.
- Onion atomsThe word is doing real work: the onion should be minced to nothing or grated, so it perfumes the bowl without anyone chewing it. A shallot is gentler than a yellow onion if the dressing is to sit.
- Method and orderFollowing the poem's sequence: sieve the potatoes, pound the cooked yolks smooth with the mustard and salt, then work in the oil before the vinegar goes in. Adding the vinegar first tends to give a flatter, sharper result.
- Yield and useTwo large potatoes make enough dressing for a salad serving six to eight. It is thick — closer to a sauce than a vinaigrette — and suits sturdy winter leaves, celery, cold beets or cold boiled meat rather than tender greens.
The lines are by Sydney Smith (1771–1845), the English clergyman, wit and co-founder of the Edinburgh Review. His salad verse was quoted, cribbed and reprinted so widely through the nineteenth century that it turns up in American household books with his first name misspelled and no attribution beyond the title, as here. Its survival owes something to the closing couplet -- "Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today" became a stock epicure's quotation -- but the formula itself is sound period practice: before commercial mayonnaise, dressings were thickened with pounded hard yolks, and sometimes with sieved potato or breadcrumb, all of which hold oil in suspension without the risk of a raw-egg emulsion breaking. Recipes did sometimes circulate as verse, and a dressing built on ratios rather than weights is the kind of thing that travels well in that form.