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Salad, Cold Vegetable
Almost all cold dressed vegetables, such as peas, French beans, haricot beans, artichokes, asparagus, cauliflower, cabbage, and potatoes, may be used as salads. They should simply be cut up, arranged neatly on a dish, beaten up very lightly with a simple salad-dressing, and garnished according to taste.
A method rather than a fixed formula, of the kind Victorian cookery books used to teach the principle and let the cook improvise from leftovers. A few of the terms and the one real technical instruction need unpacking.
- "Beaten up very lightly"This means tossed, not whipped. Cooked vegetables break down quickly under a spoon, so dress them with your hands or two forks and lift rather than stir. Overworked cauliflower and potato turn to paste, which is the failure mode of this dish.
- "A simple salad-dressing"Most likely an oil-and-vinegar dressing seasoned with salt and pepper, and sometimes a little mustard; proportions in Victorian books vary, oil usually predominating. Cooked, egg-thickened dressings were also in use, but a vinaigrette is what suits cold vegetables best.
- French beans and haricotsFrench beans are green beans, cooked whole or cut. Haricot beans are the dried white beans, soaked and simmered until tender before they ever reach the salad bowl; they are not interchangeable in prep time.
- Dress the starchy ones warmPotatoes and haricot beans take up dressing better while still warm than once fully chilled. Green vegetables are best dressed shortly before serving, since acid dulls the colour of beans, peas and asparagus.
- "Cold dressed vegetables"Dressed here means already cooked and prepared, not sauced. Cold cooked vegetables of this kind, whether cooked for the purpose or left from a previous meal, are best cooked until just tender and cooled promptly rather than left standing in their water.
- ArtichokesGlobe artichoke bottoms and hearts are meant, trimmed of choke and outer leaves. Jerusalem artichokes also work but go soft and sweet, and want a sharper dressing.
- Seasoning and yieldCold vegetables generally need more salt and acid than they did hot; taste after tossing. The recipe gives no quantities; as a rough modern guide, about 4 oz of prepared vegetable per person will serve as a side dish.
This entry is really a rule for using up what the kitchen already had. A cold vegetable salad was the respectable second life of the previous day's dinner, in the same family as the composed salads the French called salade de legumes and the mixed, mayonnaise-bound salade russe that fashionable English tables are often said to have adopted around the same period. The list of vegetables is itself a snapshot: peas, French beans, cauliflower, cabbage and potatoes were the reliable English staples, while asparagus and globe artichokes marked a household with either a good garden or money for the greengrocer. The insistence on arranging the pieces neatly and garnishing to taste reflects the period's conviction that a cold dish had to justify itself by looking deliberate, since a heap of yesterday's vegetables on a plate did not.