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Rochelle Salad
Wash two fine heads of celery, and dry them perfectly. Cut the best stalks into pieces an inch long, and lay these in a salad-bowl, mixed with the whites of three hard-boiled eggs, thinly shredded. Press the yolks of the eggs through a wire sieve, and the moment before serving pour over the salad a quarter of a pint of tartar sauce. Sprinkle over this first the powdered egg-yolks, and afterwards three fine truffles, finely shredded. Ornament the salad with anchovy, beetroot, slices of German sausages, or in any suitable manner, and serve. If liked, the truffles may be omitted, and mayonnaise sauce be substituted for the tartar sauce.
A composed celery salad of the sort Victorian kitchens built for a cold table. Nothing here is difficult, but two things carry the dish: the celery must be bone dry, and the sauce goes on at the last possible moment.
- Dress it at the tableTartar sauce or mayonnaise on raw celery draws water out within minutes, and the sauce slackens and slides to the bottom of the bowl. Assemble the celery and egg white ahead, keep the sauce cold and separate, and pour it over as the bowl leaves the kitchen.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. That is a generous coating for two heads of celery, not a dip.
- Two heads of celeryA Victorian "head" is a whole bunch, not a single rib. The recipe uses only the best stalks of two bunches; the trimmings and leaves go to stock.
- Tartar sauce, 1880s senseTartar sauce, Victorian sense -- Generally a thick mayonnaise sharpened with mustard and vinegar and stirred through with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot and tarragon or chervil, though period recipes vary. Made fresh it is thicker than bottled fish-shop tartare, which is sweeter and thinner and will not hold on the celery.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseIf you make the sauce from scratch and are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs. The salad is served cold throughout, so nothing in it is ever heated.
- Sieved yolksThe pressed yolks are the finish now known as mimosa. Push them through a fine sieve while cool and dry, and scatter only at the moment of serving, or they clump into paste on contact with the sauce.
- Truffles"Three fine truffles" means black truffle, costly then as now; bottled or tinned truffle, common in Victorian kitchens, gives the colour but little scent. The recipe offers its own outs: the truffles may be omitted, and mayonnaise substituted for the tartar sauce.
- German sausagesA firm cured, smoked slicing sausage of the cervelat or mettwurst type, cut thin. Any dry salami-style sausage works for the garnish.
- BeetrootCooked beetroot, not raw, and added at the last second on the edge of the bowl. Sitting in the sauce it will stain the whole salad pink.
Cassell's compiled its dictionary as an alphabetical reference for a servant-run household, and place-name salads like this one appear throughout it: Russian salad, Italian salad, Rochelle salad, each a fixed formula a cook could look up and reproduce. The name is often said to point to La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, though the connection is uncertain. What is genuinely of its period is the construction: winter celery, hard eggs, truffle, anchovy and cured sausage, dressed in a mayonnaise-based sauce and built up in layers for the cold buffet. Celery was a prestige winter vegetable in Britain, blanched by earthing up in trenches and sold by the head, and this salad used only the pale inner stalks of two whole bunches.