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Salad, Hungarian
Put any sort of cooked vegetables in a dish, the greater the variety the better. Season them a little, and just sprinkle with oil and lemon-juice. For a pint of vegetables allow about a gill of sauce made as follows. Take the yolks of three raw eggs, a table-spoonful of vinegar, the same of any pale meat stock or water, a pinch of salt and pepper, and two table-spoonfuls of oil. The whole of the ingredients, except the oil, are to be put in an enamelled saucepan, which should be set in another containing hot water; then the sauce is stirred until thick; the water in the lower pan should only reach simmering point, therefore the fire must be slow. As soon as taken from the fire the pan must be set in another one containing cold water, and the stirring continued until the sauce is quite cold. The oil is then added drop by drop. Pour over the vegetables, and garnish with chopped hard-boiled eggs and green herbs. Probable cost, uncertain.
A cooked-yolk dressing rather than a true mayonnaise, poured over a mixture of leftover cooked vegetables. Nearly everything that can go wrong happens in the sauce.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerThe yolks thicken between roughly 150F and 175F and scramble not far above that. Set the bowl or enamelled pan over water that is steaming but not bubbling, stir without stopping, and pull it off the heat the moment it coats the spoon. A thermometer taken to about 165F is a more reliable guide than the eye, and also brings the yolks to a safe temperature.
- A gillIn this British book a gill is 5 fl oz, so a pint of vegetables takes a scant two-thirds of a cup of sauce. The recipe as written yields a little less than that, which is no hardship.
- "Enamelled saucepan" and the double boilerThe instruction is about avoiding bare iron or unlined copper, which discolours an acid egg sauce. Any stainless or glass bowl set over a pan of hot water does the job.
- Why the sauce is cooled before the oilOil beaten into a warm yolk base is more likely to slacken and separate. Chilling the pan in cold water, stirring as it cools, firms the base so the oil goes in cleanly, drop by drop, as for mayonnaise.
- If it curdlesTake it off the heat at once and whisk in a spoonful of cold stock or water; if it has gone properly grainy, start again with a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a little at a time.
- The vegetablesBoiled potato, carrot, green beans, peas, beetroot and cauliflower are the obvious candidates, cut to roughly even dice. Dress them with the oil and lemon while still warm so they absorb the seasoning, then cool before the sauce goes on, or it will thin.
- Vinegar and oilA pale wine vinegar and a mild oil suit the sauce; a strongly flavoured extra-virgin olive oil will dominate it. Keep the beetroot separate until serving unless you want the whole dish pink.
- Yield and servingA pint of vegetables with this quantity of sauce serves four as a side salad. Serve cold, the same day; an egg-yolk sauce of this kind does not keep.
Cassell's is following the late-nineteenth-century fashion for the composed vegetable salad in the Russian and Central European manner - diced cooked vegetables bound in a thick egg sauce, of a piece with the salade russe and with the vegetable salads still sold by the kilo in delicatessens from Vienna to Budapest. "Hungarian" in British cookery books of the period was often a loose label, sometimes signalling paprika or soured cream, or simply an Austro-Hungarian rather than French treatment, and here it seems to attach to little more than the profusion of vegetables and the hard-boiled egg garnish. The cooked-yolk dressing is the practical point of the recipe: it stretches three yolks and two spoonfuls of oil across a whole dish. The closing note, "probable cost, uncertain" - the book usually gives a price - suggests the salad was assembled from whatever cold vegetables happened to be to hand.