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Grouse Salad
Roast a grouse, and cut it into neat joints. Put these in a pie-dish, strew a little salt and pepper over them, and pour on them the juice of a lemon and two table-spoonfuls of Lucca oil. Let them remain for three or four hours, turning and basting them frequently. Wash and dry thoroughly some fresh lettuce. This should be done some hours before the salad is wanted. The leaves should be well shaken, placed in an unpainted wire basket, and hung in a cool, airy place, so that they may be perfectly dried. A salad can never be a success if there is any water hanging about it. Shred the lettuce finely, and place a deep bed of it at the bottom of the dish; arrange the pieces of grouse neatly upon it, and ornament the top with slices of hard-boiled egg, sprigs of parsley, and, if liked, a little savoury jelly. Put the yolks of two eggs into a basin, beat them for three or four minutes, and add half a teaspoonful of salt, and half a tea-spoonful of pepper. Add oil and vinegar (tarragon vinegar is the best) until the sauce is the desired thickness, allowing six tea-spoonfuls of oil to every one of vinegar. Begin with the oil, and pour it in two or three drops at a time for the first two tea-spoonfuls. Mix with a wooden spoon. If properly made, the sauce will be thick and smooth, like cream. Just before the salad is served, pour this sauce over the grouse, and amongst the lettuce. Put a border of curled celery round the dish, and beyond that slices of hard-boiled egg, and clear savoury jelly, cut into rough dice. Time, half an hour to roast the grouse. Probable cost, exclusive of the grouse, about 2s. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A late-Victorian composed game salad: roast grouse marinated in oil and lemon, laid on shredded lettuce and dressed with a hand-made mayonnaise. Most of the work is in the details the text takes for granted.
- Dry the lettuce properlyThis is the hinge of the dish, and the book says so: any water clinging to the leaves will thin the mayonnaise and slide it off. A salad spinner followed by twenty minutes spread on a towel does what the hanging wire basket did.
- Lucca oilLucca in Tuscany was the source of the finest olive oil sold in Britain, and "Lucca oil" was simply the trade name for good table olive oil. Use a mild extra-virgin oil; a strongly peppery one will fight the grouse.
- The grouseRed grouse is a small bird, commonly around 12 oz to 1 lb oven-ready, and yields little more than two breasts and two legs. Half an hour is a long roast by current practice: 20-25 minutes in a hot oven (about 425F), breast still pink, then rest, gives better meat. Partridge, pheasant or even good roast duck breast substitutes.
- YieldEight to ten people from one grouse is optimistic even as a garnished salad. Reckon one bird for two or three as a first course, and scale the marinade accordingly.
- Raw yolksThe sauce is a plain mayonnaise and is never cooked. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated until it goes to table.
- Mayonnaise proportionsSix parts oil to one of vinegar is right, and two yolks will carry a cup of oil comfortably, and more if you want it. The instruction to add the first two teaspoons drop by drop is what prevents splitting; a bowl set on a damp cloth keeps it steady while you work.
- Season the sauce lightlyHalf a teaspoon of pepper in two yolks is a great deal by modern palates. Start with a quarter teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Savoury jellyThis is aspic - clarified, well-seasoned game or veal stock set with its own gelatine or a little added. Chilled firm, turned out and chopped roughly, it was the standard glitter on a cold table. Powdered gelatine and a good reduced stock give the same effect.
- Curled celeryCelery cut into short lengths, slit lengthways at both ends and dropped into iced water until the strips curl back. It takes about an hour and is purely decorative.
- Cost"About 2s." is two shillings for everything but the bird, which tells you the grouse itself was the expense - as it still is.
Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the decades when grouse shooting had become a fixture of the British social calendar, the season opening on 12 August, the "Glorious Twelfth", and birds travelling south by rail to reach London tables within a day or two. Cold game salads of this kind belonged to the supper table, the shooting lunch and the ball buffet: the bird could be roasted in the morning, the jelly set overnight, and the mayonnaise made and poured over at the last moment. The insistence on "Lucca oil" and tarragon vinegar reflects a period when English cooks were being coaxed toward French salad practice; earlier English writers were often suspicious of oil altogether, and boiled dressings thickened with cream and mustard remained common alongside true mayonnaise well into the nineteenth century. The careful paragraph on drying lettuce in a hanging wire basket is a reminder that a household of this sort had both the space and the staff to begin a salad hours before dinner.