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Game Salad
Make a salad of some lettuce, endive, and water-cress, with one thinly-sliced apple. Mix in a salad-bowl with some dressing, and put some mustard-and-cress on top. Squeeze the juice of an orange over, then place some neatly-cut pieces of cold pheasant or other game on top, sprinkle a little minced shallot and parsley over, and garnish round with hard-boiled egg and beetroot.
A cold-game salad of the kind built from Monday's leftovers off a Sunday roast bird. Nothing here is difficult; the points worth knowing are about ingredients that have shifted meaning and the order of assembly.
- Mustard-and-cressTwo seedlings grown together and cut young — white mustard and garden cress — sold in punnets in Britain and still are. Salad cress alone, or the microgreens sold in most markets, stands in without complaint.
- Water-cress versus cressThe recipe uses both, and they are different plants. Watercress goes into the body of the salad for its pepper; the finer mustard-and-cress is scattered on top as a garnish.
- EndiveIn a British book of this period this almost certainly means garden endive, the frilly curly sort or the broader-leaved Batavian, rather than Belgian endive (chicory witloof). Either eats well here.
- The dressingThe recipe says only 'some dressing' and does not specify which; a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing, salt and pepper, suits it. Dress lightly: the orange juice added afterwards brings its own acid, and an over-dressed base will collapse under it.
- Order of assemblyThe hinge of the dish is that the game goes on last, on top of already-dressed leaves. Tossing cold pheasant through the salad shreds it and greys the appearance the arrangement is aiming at.
- Cold gamePheasant, partridge, grouse or wild duck, cooked and thoroughly chilled, carved into neat slices across the grain. Leftover roast chicken or guinea fowl works, though it lacks the depth that makes the orange and shallot make sense.
- ShotWild birds may carry lead shot in the flesh. Check slices before plating, particularly around the breast and thigh.
- AppleSlice it at the last moment or hold it in acidulated water; a sharp variety such as Cox or Braeburn holds its shape better than a soft eating apple.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities beyond one apple and one orange. The meat of a single pheasant, stretched over leaves, will do for two to four depending on how it is served. Scale the leaves to the bird rather than the reverse.
Salads built on cold game belong to the shooting season and to the practical side of a large Victorian household, where a roast pheasant or brace of partridge rarely came to table only once. The pairing of game with orange and a sharp dressing is older than the book: acid fruit was long thought to cut the richness of dark birds, and the same logic gives us bigarade sauce for duck and rowan or redcurrant jelly for venison. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class kitchens rather than grand ones, is full of entries of this kind — the salad as a made dish assembled from what already exists in the larder, dressed up with hard-boiled egg and beetroot so it can be sent to table without apology. The beetroot-and-egg garnish — the recipe says only to garnish round with it — was a familiar decorative convention of the period, and one imagines the red-and-yellow contrast against green leaves counted for as much as anything it added to the eating.