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Rombo or Fowl in Salad Sauce
Take a cold roast fowl and bone it, or cut up any remaining from the previous day into suitable-sized pieces. Make a sauce as follows. Take the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, beat them up, and add to them two spoonfuls of oil, a spoonful and a half of vinegar, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, pepper, salt, and a little flour of mustard, to which may be added a tea-spoonful of chopped tarragon and onion. Dip each piece of fowl separately in this seasoning, and arrange the pieces in a dish garnished with hard-boiled eggs cut in rings, and sprigs of parsley.
A cold-fowl salad dressed with a hard-yolk sauce — essentially a rough, unemulsified mayonnaise thickened with cooked yolk rather than raw. The whole thing hangs on the sauce being loose enough to coat but thick enough to cling.
- "Spoonfuls" hereThe recipe distinguishes only between a "spoonful" and a "tea-spoonful", and in a sauce of this size the larger measure is most likely a tablespoon. Read it as roughly 2 tablespoons oil to 1½ tablespoons vinegar — a sharper ratio than modern vinaigrettes, which suits cold poultry but can be pulled back toward 3:1 if it tastes harsh.
- Flour of mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. A quarter teaspoon is plenty; it also helps the sauce hold together.
- Building the saucePush the cooked yolks through a sieve before beating rather than mashing them with a fork — sieved yolk gives a smooth base, mashed yolk stays grainy. Work the oil in first, then the vinegar, or the sauce will slacken and separate.
- Dipping versus tossingDipping each piece separately, as written, coats the meat without shredding it. Tossing boned cold fowl in a bowl breaks it up and muddies the presentation the recipe is aiming for.
- TemperatureEverything should be properly cold from the refrigerator, and the finished dish is best assembled shortly before serving. An oil-and-vinegar dressing on cold cooked chicken should not sit out at room temperature for more than a couple of hours.
- YieldThe sauce as written is a small quantity: two yolks with about two spoonfuls of oil will only lightly coat the meat, so it suits a modest amount of cold fowl rather than a whole large bird. Double the sauce if you want the pieces generously coated.
- GarnishThe recipe calls for hard-boiled eggs cut in rings. The two whites left from the yolks used in the sauce can be pressed into service here, so nothing is wasted, though sliced whole eggs are what is specified.
This belongs to the great Victorian and Edwardian category of "remains" cookery — dishes designed around yesterday's roast, which in a household without refrigeration had to be used promptly and made to look deliberate rather than leftover. The dressing is a cooked-yolk sauce, of a kind that coexisted with raw-egg mayonnaise in the cookery of the period and belongs to the older "salad sauce" or sauce rémoulade tradition; tarragon and onion appear here as an optional addition. The name is puzzling, since rombo is the Italian word for turbot, and the label may simply have travelled from a fish salad to a fowl one. The book's habit of offering two names for one dish — a decorative foreign one and a plain English gloss — is itself typical of the period, when a French or Italian title raised the standing of a dish made from cold chicken.