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Endive Salad
Trim and wash well a good-sized endive, divide into small piece, drain and dry in a cloth or salad basket, put it in a salad bowl, season with pepper and salt, pour some salad dressing over and mix thoroughly. This salad can be mixed with finely-shredded celery, small cress, or sprigs of water-cress if so preferred. Probable cost, 8d.
A three-line salad whose success rests almost entirely on the drying. Two words in it — "endive" and "salad dressing" — mean something different from what a modern reader assumes.
- What endive meant hereIn British usage of this period, endive is the frilly, pale-hearted head sold today as curly endive or frisée, or its broad-leaved cousin escarole. It is not Belgian endive (witloof chicory), the pale torpedo-shaped chicon, which was far less common in British kitchens at the time. A good-sized head will make a side salad for a small table.
- The hinge: dry it properlyWet leaves dilute the dressing and it slides off into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. The "salad basket" is a wire cage swung by its handle to fling water off; a modern spin-dryer does the same job, and a final few minutes spread on a towel does no harm.
- "Salad dressing"Cassell's carries salad dressings under their own headings. One common form is a French dressing of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper; another is a thicker dressing of egg yolk, cream, mustard and vinegar. Either suits curly endive, though the bitterness takes the sharper vinaigrette better.
- Small cressThis is the seedling stage of garden cress, almost always grown and sold with mustard as "mustard and cress". Punnets of cress shoots or any peppery micro-green stand in directly.
- WatercressBuy cultivated bunches rather than gathering wild cress from streams, which can carry liver fluke. Pick over for yellowed leaves and coarse stems before adding the sprigs.
- Taming the bitternessCurly endive is markedly more bitter than lettuce. Use the pale inner leaves for the salad and keep the dark outer ones for wilting, or soak the trimmed pieces in cold water for half an hour before drying.
- Dress at the tableEndive holds up better than lettuce, but it still softens once oiled. Mix it just before it goes out; the recipe's "mix thoroughly" is meant to be the last thing that happens to it.
- "Probable cost, 8d."Eightpence in old pence, from an era of twelve pence to the shilling. Cassell's gives these figures throughout as a rough guide for household accounting; they are useless as prices now but tell you the salad sat at the cheap end of the table.
Endive belongs to the chicory family and reached English gardens as a winter salad plant, valued precisely because it stood in the ground when lettuce would not — a bowl of green in January was the point of it. Victorian gardeners blanched the heads by covering them with a pot or tying the outer leaves over the heart, which pales the centre and pulls the bitterness down; that is why the recipe assumes a head with a tender interior worth eating raw. Its place in Cassell's reflects the late-nineteenth-century view of salad as a matter of technique rather than invention: wash, drain, dry, season, dress, and vary with whatever cress or celery the kitchen had.