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Russian Salad
Cut some carrots, turnips, parsnips, and beetroot into strips with a scoop. Add, if liked, other vegetables, such as asparagus, peas, French beans, gherkins, capers, scraped horse-radish, etc., etc. Put the vegetables in a salad-dish in layers, season each layer with mayonnaise or Tartar sauce, and gradually diminish the size of the layers, till the salad comes to a point. Ornament with a border of aspic jelly, picked prawns, olives, or gherkins, and garnish the surface with small balls of caviare.
A Victorian composed salad, built as a pyramid rather than tossed. The instructions assume a good deal of knowledge the modern cook has to supply, chiefly that the root vegetables are cooked and cold before they are cut.
- Cook the roots firstCarrots, turnips, parsnips and beetroot are meant to be boiled until just tender, then cooled completely before shaping. Raw batons will not hold dressing and will taste wrong against the mayonnaise.
- "With a scoop"Probably a vegetable cutter or scoop of the kind sold for shaping cooked roots; since the recipe asks for strips, a knife cutting even 1/4-inch batons will serve just as well.
- Keep the beetroot apartThe recipe does not say so, but it is worth dressing the beetroot separately and adding it at the last moment, or the whole pyramid turns pink.
- Building the pointWork on a flat plate rather than a bowl, laying the widest ring of vegetables first and stepping each layer in by about half an inch. Chill for an hour before serving so the mayonnaise sets enough to hold the shape when cut.
- Mayonnaise and Tartar sauceBoth are used raw here. If you are making mayonnaise from scratch for anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs; jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of vinegar works perfectly well as the binder.
- Aspic jellyA savoury meat or vegetable stock set to a jelly, chopped once firm and spooned round the base as a glittering border. A strong meat stock may set on its own; otherwise powdered gelatine will be needed, and a jelly firm enough to chop wants a stiffer set than the packet's standard proportion.
- "Picked prawns"Peeled cooked prawns, shells and heads removed. Nothing more technical is meant.
- Caviare ballsSmall spoonfuls of caviare or lumpfish roe rolled between two wetted teaspoons. Sturgeon caviare is now restricted and expensive; salmon roe or lumpfish roe stands in without any loss to the design.
- QuantityNo amounts are given at all. About 2 lb of mixed vegetables and roughly a cup of mayonnaise will build a pyramid for six as a first course.
"Russian salad" reached British and French kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, and is generally traced to the elaborate composed salads of the salade russe type served in fashionable restaurants of the period. The recipe is really an exercise in arrangement: the cook is being taught to cut vegetables to a uniform size, bind them with a set sauce, and build upward to a point, the same skills used for chaudfroids and moulded entrees. The diminishing layers and the caviare studding belong to a style of service in which dishes were carried to the table already dressed and had to survive being looked at. The modern descendant, diced vegetables and peas stirred into mayonnaise and served flat, keeps the ingredients and abandons the architecture.