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Salad, Boiled
Boil separately equal quantities of French beans and celery or cauliflower. Drain them, and cut them up small. Put them into a salad-bowl, and sprinkle over them a layer of shredded lettuce, endive, or chervil. Pour over the whole a little salad dressing, mix lightly, and serve. Boiled onion and slices of cold meat, fish, or poultry may be added, or not.
A Victorian composed salad of cooked vegetables dressed while still cool, closer to a modern salade composée than to a bowl of leaves. The whole thing hinges on how the vegetables are treated after boiling.
- Drain and dry properlyDrain well -- The recipe says only "drain," but boiled beans and cauliflower hold water on their surfaces and will thin the dressing, so it is worth draining thoroughly before dressing.
- French beansThese are green beans, string beans in American usage, cooked whole in the pod rather than shelled. Five to seven minutes in well-salted water leaves them tender but not limp; period cookery books often gave considerably longer times.
- Celery, boiledBoiled celery has largely dropped out of the repertoire but works here — cut into short lengths and simmer 8-10 minutes until it gives to a knife without collapsing. Cauliflower florets need about the same.
- Endive and chervil"Endive" in a British book of this date usually means curly endive (frisée), not Belgian endive. Chervil is a soft anise-scented herb sold in small bunches; flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the nearest substitute.
- "A little salad dressing"The recipe does not specify which dressing. A plain vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt, pepper and often a little mustard suits it, and in books of this date "salad dressing" can equally mean a boiled cream-and-egg dressing; about 3-4 tablespoons is enough for four servings.
- Dress while barely warmOrder of assembly -- Dress the beans and celery first, then scatter the raw leaves on top so they do not wilt, as the recipe's "sprinkle over them a layer" implies.
- The cold meatThe optional cold meat, fish or poultry suggests a way of using up the remains of a joint. Anything added should be kept chilled until the moment it goes in, and the finished salad eaten the same day rather than kept.
- YieldAbout a pound of cooked vegetables total serves four as a side, two as a light main with meat or fish added.
Boiled salads of this kind sit in a long European tradition that predates the modern assumption that salad means raw leaves; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookery books already describe "sallets" built from cooked roots, beans and herbs dressed with oil and vinegar. The entry reads as a template rather than a set piece — a way of using up boiled vegetables and the remains of a joint, given shape by a fresh raw element and a sharp dressing. Cooked-vegetable salads of this type run alongside the French salade russe and anticipate the mayonnaise-bound vegetable salads of the twentieth century.