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Salad, Cheap and Good
Take one pennyworth of mustard and cress, two pennyworth of water-cress, two pennyworth of cooked beetroot, and a fourpenny head of celery; cut the beet into small squares; take a glass or silver dish, pile the beet in pyramids, do the same with the celery and water-cress, and arrange all round the dish; heap the mustard and cress into a pile in the centre; boil two eggs hard; take the yolks, and mix them with a little mashed potato, a table-spoonful of vinegar, half a table-spoonful of Harvey's sauce, and ketchup, pepper, and salt, two spoonfuls of milk, the same of oil, and a salt-spoonful of sugar; pour this over the whole.
A Victorian composed salad whose real interest is the dressing: hard egg yolk and mashed potato thickened with vinegar, oil and bottled sauces, a forerunner of the creamy salad creams that later came in jars. The quantities are given in shop prices, so the amounts need translating by eye.
- PennyworthsThe original measures by price rather than by weight, which cannot be converted exactly. As a working guide: one punnet of mustard and cress, two generous bunches of watercress, two medium cooked beetroot, and one whole head of celery.
- Mustard and cressSold as a living punnet in Britain and commonly grown at home on damp flannel in the Victorian period. Any fine microgreen mix or salad cress works; snip it at the base rather than pulling it up.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy, soy and walnut-ketchup sauce, no longer made. Worcestershire sauce is the closest survivor; use half a tablespoon as written.
- KetchupIn Victorian usage ketchup usually meant mushroom or walnut ketchup, thin, dark and salty, not tomato. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; if you substitute tomato ketchup the dressing turns sweet and loses its savoury edge.
- The dressing hingeSieve the hot hard-boiled yolks and the mashed potato together while warm, then beat in the vinegar and oil a little at a time. Added all at once, or worked cold, the potato stays lumpy and the sauce will not come together.
- Small measuresA salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon. The unspecified oil should be a mild olive or other neutral salad oil; the two spoonfuls of milk are what keep the dressing pourable.
- Beetroot bleedDress the salad at the table. Left standing, the beetroot stains the cress and the pale dressing pink within minutes, which defeats the whole point of the arranged piles.
- YieldEnough as a side salad for four, or two as a light supper with bread and cheese. The two egg whites are left over; chop them and scatter them over the top.
Cassell's had an eye on households counting pennies, and this entry shows how the arithmetic was done: not in ounces but in what the greengrocer's barrow charged, so a cook could price the dish before leaving the house. Mustard and cress was the cheapest green in Victorian Britain, grown in days on wet flannel or a windowsill tray, and watercress was famously a street-hawked food of the London poor. The arrangement into pyramids on a glass or silver dish is pure period table fashion, borrowed from far grander salads, and the dressing shows the reach of the bottled-sauce trade: Harvey's sauce, an anchovy-and-soy relish generally traced to the eighteenth century and named for its supposed originator, was ordinary enough to appear in a salad whose listed greens came to about ninepence, eggs, potato and bottled sauces aside. Thickening a dressing with sieved hard yolk and mashed potato rather than raw yolk would have made a small quantity of oil go a long way.