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Salad, Beef
Cut a pound of cold beef into thin slices; put these into a salad-bowl with half a pound of fresh lettuce or endive dried and shredded small, and a quarter of a pound of cold boiled haricot beans. Add, if liked, a pickled gherkin chopped small, or a spoonful of sliced tarragon-leaves, or chervil, or onion. Season the salad with a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, half a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, two spoonfuls of vinegar, and five spoonfuls of good salad-oil. Mix all lightly together with a fork, and serve. The salad ought not to be mixed until it is about to be served. Time, a quarter of an hour to prepare the salad. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A leftovers salad of the sort Victorian households built around the remains of a joint. The proportions work as written; the main decisions are what "spoonful" means and how much salt you actually want.
- "Spoonful"In Victorian usage an unqualified spoonful usually means a tablespoon, and the recipe specifies teaspoons where it wants them. Read that way, two tablespoons vinegar to five of oil is a slightly sharp 1:2.5 dressing, which suits cold beef and beans.
- Salt and pepperA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for under two pounds of food is heavy by current taste, especially if the beef was boiled in salted water or brined. Start with half the salt, mix, and taste before adding more.
- Haricot beansDried white beans — navy, cannellini or coco blanc — boiled and cooled, not green beans. About half a drained 400 g tin (roughly 115 g) gives the quarter pound cooked called for here.
- EndiveBritish usage: curly endive or frisée, not Belgian chicory. Either works, but frisée stands up to the oil better than lettuce does.
- The beefCold roast or boiled beef, sliced thin across the grain. Fridge-cold meat tastes flat and firm; let it sit out twenty minutes before slicing so the fat softens.
- Mixed mustardMustard powder already made up with water — the period equivalent of prepared English mustard, which is a direct substitute.
- Mix at the last momentThe one instruction worth obeying literally. Vinegar and salt collapse the lettuce within minutes; have everything cut and the dressing measured, then combine at the table.
- Yield and costThree to four as a light main course, as the recipe states. The 2s is the book's own costing for the dish, quoted in Victorian money; it is a figure to compare against the book's other entries rather than a modern price.
Beef salad belongs to the large family of Victorian second-day dishes — the cold-meat cookery that every household with a Sunday joint needed. Cassell's, published in parts from the 1870s and reissued for decades, was aimed at the middle-class kitchen where waste was a moral as well as financial matter, and it gives many such salads and réchauffés. The haricot beans and the oil-heavy dressing suggest French influence, which ran strongly through English cookery writing after the middle of the century. The instruction not to dress until serving, and the note of "probable cost", are both typical of the book's habit of treating the reader as a manager as much as a cook.