Home › The Principles of Cookery › MOOR GAME SALAD (a la Soyer)
MOOR GAME SALAD (a la Soyer)
Put a slight layer of butter round a dish, by means of which secure a border of hard-boiled eggs. Cut into four, lengthwise, taking off the tip to make them stand. Fill the dish with a seasonable fresh salad: garnish the egg-border tastefully with beetroot, fillets of anchovies, or gherkins. For the sauce observe the following instructions. Take two table-spoonfuls of finely-chopped shallots, two of pounded sugar, the yolks of two eggs, two table-spoonfuls of chopped tarragon and chervil, a salt-spoonful of white pepper, two of salt, twelve table-spoonfuls of salad-oil (which should be very gradually mixed), and three of chilli vinegar. When mixed keep it on ice until wanted, and when ready to serve add half a pint of whipped cream. Pour a little of the sauce over the salad. Arrange the inferior parts of three roast grouse on the top, over which pour more sauce, and continue to place the joints in a pyramidal form with the sauce, until all be well used up. Mr. Soyer considered this salad "better adapted to gentlemen than ladies."
A Victorian composed salad: a ring of quartered hard-boiled eggs, a green salad beneath, and roast grouse built up in a pyramid with a sweetened tarragon mayonnaise lightened with whipped cream. The sauce is the whole dish, and it is where the care goes.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropTwelve tablespoons of oil going into two yolks needs care, and the first third must go in almost drop by drop with constant beating. If it splits, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
- Moor gameMoor game is red grouse. Any roast game bird works; a roast pheasant or two partridges will stand in without changing the method.
- "The inferior parts"Legs, thighs, wings and the scraps left after the breasts have been carved. That the recipe asks only for the lesser joints suggests a dish built from the remains of an earlier roast, though it does not say so.
- MeasuresA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, so the sauce takes a quarter teaspoon of white pepper and half a teaspoon of salt. Half a pint of cream is 10 fl oz in the British measure this book uses, which whips to a large volume; fold it in at the last moment or the sauce will slacken and weep.
- Chilli vinegarAn infusion of dried red chillies in vinegar, made domestically and also sold bottled. White wine vinegar with a small pinch of cayenne is the nearest equivalent.
- Pounded sugarCaster sugar. Two tablespoons in this quantity of sauce reads as very sweet to a modern palate, and one is closer to current taste against the shallot and vinegar.
- Raw yolksThe sauce is never cooked. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated until the moment it goes on the plate, as the original directs with its ice.
- AssemblyButter the rim of a shallow dish so the egg quarters stick standing upright, tips trimmed flat. Build the meat and sauce in layers rather than dressing everything at once, and do it no more than half an hour before serving or the salad beneath collapses.
Alexis Soyer (1810-1858) was chef at the Reform Club and the most publicly visible cook in Britain of his generation, known as much for his famine kitchens in Ireland and his field stoves in the Crimea as for his restaurant work. Salads of this kind em a ring of egg, a dressed heap of leaves, cold game rebuilt into a pyramid over a rich cream sauce em belong to the French tradition Soyer worked in, where a cold dish was expected to be architecture as much as food. Grouse made it seasonal in the strictest sense: the British shooting season opens on 12 August, and moor game appeared on club and country-house tables from then into the autumn, with the remains of yesterday's roast turned into salads and salmis. The parting remark about the dish being "better adapted to gentlemen than ladies" is Soyer's own showmanship, and is often taken to reflect a Victorian convention that strongly seasoned, heavy game dishes belonged to the male dining room.