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Ham Salad
Slice up very finely two small onions, a lettuce pulled into small pieces, and some endive. Put them into a salad bowl, and shave some lean cooked ham on top. Sprinkle with lemon-juice, dredge over with salt, cayenne, Jamaica pepper, a little castor sugar, and a soupcon of garlic. Add a little vinegar and oil, sprinkle powdered hard-boiled yolk of egg over, and serve.
A late-Victorian composed salad that assumes you know how to dress greens by eye. The quantities for oil, vinegar and seasoning are left to the cook, so the useful work is in the proportions and in decoding two or three ingredient names.
- Dress it last, and lightlyThe lemon juice, vinegar and oil all go on shredded lettuce that will collapse within minutes. Toss the greens with oil first so they are coated, then add the acid and seasonings, and take the bowl to the table straight away.
- Jamaica pepperThis is allspice, the dried berry of Pimenta dioica, not a chilli and not black pepper. A pinch of freshly ground allspice is plenty for a salad this size; it reads as sweet and clove-like against the ham.
- Castor sugarCaster sugar, the fine-grained white sugar sold in Britain; superfine or granulated sugar works. A quarter teaspoon at most, its job is to soften the two acids rather than to sweeten.
- EndiveIn an English book of this date endive means the curly-leaved bitter salad now sold as frisée or escarole, not the pale forced Belgian chicory. Either will do, but frisée is what was meant.
- Two acids, so go easyLemon juice and vinegar together will strip the salad if both are used generously. Reckon on roughly three parts oil to one part total acid, split between the juice and a mild wine vinegar.
- Onion and garlicTwo small raw onions sliced finely is still aggressive by modern palates; spring onions or a mild red onion are closer to the intended effect, and rinsing sliced onion in cold water takes the sting out. The "soupcon" of garlic is best delivered by rubbing a cut clove around the bowl.
- Shaved hamAsk for cooked ham sliced as thinly as the machine will go, then tear it into ribbons. The recipe gives no quantity; about 6 oz (170 g) is a reasonable amount for a bowl of this sort.
- The yolk garnish"Powdered" here means reduced to a fine crumb rather than chopped; pushing the hard-boiled yolk through a fine sieve is the easiest way to get it, and it falls as a fine yellow dust. Scatter it after dressing, or it turns to paste.
- YieldQuantities are left open, but as written it will serve roughly four as a first course or light lunch, two as a main salad.
Salads of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century habit of serving cooked meat cold and well seasoned. It is essentially a demonstration of the standard salad formula of the day: greens, oil and acid, a battery of seasonings including sugar, and a sieved yolk garnish. That garnish is now often called mimosa, for the yellow blossom it resembles. The presence of allspice under its older trade name, Jamaica pepper, points to the Caribbean origin of the spice, and the instruction for "a soupcon of garlic" reflects the period's caution about garlic, which was to be sensed rather than tasted.