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French Salad
It would be difficult to particularise a French salad. It is composed of everything or anything. Many improvised dishes of salad, such as beans, potatoes, cauliflower, and celery (cooked), are served at a French table, seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, chopped tarragon, or a little tarragon vinegar. Fish salads, too, are highly relished, namely, the remains of any solid fish, such as cod, sole, or turbot, for which the following sauce will be found excellent, as it will be also for a lettuce or other vegetable salad. Bruise the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs with a wooden spoon, and moisten with a raw egg; put this egg-mixture into a bowl, with two salt-spoonfuls of salt, a little pepper, and a pinch of cayenne; add by degrees oil and vinegar, alternately, until the required quantity, three table-spoonfuls of oil and one of vinegar, which may be tarragon, has been mixed. Keep the sauce stirred and well smoothed with the spoon. Add half a tea-spoonful of shredded onion, and the same of chervil and tarragon, if plain vinegar has been used with the oil. Two table-spoonfuls of thick cream or melted butter will make the sauce richer and better, and the whites of eggs may be chopped and added to the salad.
What is being taught here is not a salad so much as a sauce: a cooked-yolk emulsion, halfway between mayonnaise and a French vinaigrette, meant to be poured over whatever cold cooked vegetables or fish the kitchen has left.
- The hinge: add the oil slowlyThe two hard yolks are there as an emulsifier and a body-builder, but the sauce still breaks if the oil goes in fast. Work the yolks perfectly smooth against the side of the bowl first, then dribble the oil in a few drops at a time, alternating with the vinegar, stirring without pause.
- Salt-spoonfulA Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon, so two salt-spoonfuls is about half a teaspoon of salt. Season at the end as well; oil dulls salt.
- Quantities and yieldThree tablespoons oil to one of vinegar makes only about a quarter of a cup of dressing before the eggs are counted, enough to dress a lettuce for four or a bowl of cold potatoes. Scale up in the same 3:1 proportion, keeping one whole raw egg per two hard-boiled yolks.
- Raw eggThe raw egg is never heated. If serving to anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs in the shell or pasteurised liquid yolk, which emulsify perfectly well here.
- Melted butter sets hardButter is offered as an alternative to cream for richness, but a cold salad dressed with a butter-based sauce will go grainy and stiff in the refrigerator. Cream is the better of the two options unless the salad is to be eaten at once and at room temperature.
- Chervil and tarragonFresh chervil is hard to find; parsley plus a little extra tarragon is the usual stand-in, though it loses the faint aniseed note. Tarragon vinegar is still sold, and the recipe rightly says to drop the added fresh herbs if you use it, or the sauce turns medicinal.
- Cold cooked fishLeftover cod, sole or turbot for a salad should have been cooled quickly and refrigerated, and used within a day. Flake it in large pieces and fold the sauce through at the last minute, or the fish goes to paste.
- The vegetablesBeans, potatoes, cauliflower and celery all want to be dressed while just warm, not hot and not chilled, so they absorb the sauce. Potatoes in particular take seasoning best in the first few minutes after draining.
Cassell's shrugs at the idea of defining a French salad because in nineteenth-century English kitchens the phrase meant less a fixed dish than a style of thrift: cold cooked vegetables and yesterday's fish, made presentable by a properly made dressing. The sauce given here uses hard yolks alongside a raw one, which is often said to make the emulsion more forgiving. English writers of the period were fond of contrasting their own boiled salad dressings with the Continental habit of oil and vinegar, and there was a long-standing joke that dressing a salad properly required a Frenchman. Tarragon and chervil carry the same signal: both were then thought of as distinctly French herbs, chervil being far more familiar in the fines herbes of a Paris kitchen than in most English cooking.