Home › The Principles of Cookery › ITALIAN SALAD (another way)
ITALIAN SALAD (another way)
Pile in the centre of a dish the white meat picked from a cold chicken either roasted, boiled, or fricasseed, and shred a little lean ham to distribute equally amongst it. Veal also may be used, cut in very thin slices about the size of a shilling. Surround the meat with a wall of young crisp lettuces, small cress, or any salad vegetables in season. Boil some eggs hard, remove the yolks, and cut the whites into thin rings, which arrange in chains over the top. Pour over the centre any salad sauce, in which cream should predominate, and serve at once, that the salad may not get sodden.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the assembly is the whole point. Dress it at the table's edge, not in the kitchen.
- Dress at the last momentThe closing line is the hinge: the sauce goes on as the dish leaves the kitchen. Lettuce and cress collapse within minutes under a cream dressing, and the meat turns pasty.
- "The size of a shilling"A Victorian shilling was about 24 mm across, roughly an inch. Veal cut that small and thin is meant to eat like the picked chicken beside it, not like a slice of roast.
- Small cressGarden cress grown as seedlings, sold now as cress or as part of mustard-and-cress punnets. Watercress sprigs or pea shoots stand in; both are more assertive than the original.
- Salad sauce with cream predominatingThe recipe leaves the sauce open, saying only that cream should predominate; a mayonnaise or boiled dressing let down with cream, rather than whipped cream, fits that instruction. Thin a good mayonnaise with double cream and sharpen with lemon or tarragon vinegar until it just coats a spoon.
- The hard eggsTen to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives firm whites that cut into clean rings without the grey ring at the yolk. The yolks are surplus here; sieve them over the top as a garnish or keep them for the dressing.
- The hamShredded lean ham is seasoning as much as meat. A little dry-cured ham goes further than a lot of wet-cured supermarket ham, which will leak into the dressing.
- YieldThe picked white meat of one roast chicken with a few slices of ham serves four as a lunch dish, six if it opens a longer meal.
"Italian salad" in nineteenth-century English cookery books rarely has much to do with Italy; the name attached itself to composed salads of cold cooked meat, hard eggs and a rich dressing, built up on the dish. Cassell's places it among the salad entries as one of several variations, and such a dish suited a Victorian household: the roast or boiled fowl of one day could reappear, picked and arranged, at the next day's cold table or supper. The insistence on white meat, thin slices and a wall of green suggests a dish for looking at as much as eating. The instruction to serve at once, "that the salad may not get sodden", is the recipe's own reason for assembling it late.