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Salad, Italian
Cut some thin slices of beetroot with a crimped cutter, season with oil and vinegar, dust with mignonette pepper, sprinkle with the chopped whites of some hard-boiled eggs and tiny fillets of anchovies that have lain for a time in lemon-juice. Next take some stoned olives, and fill the cavities with the pounded yolks of eggs mixed with a little mayonnaise, and put it in with a forcing-bag and pipe. These look nice on a dish-paper round a mound of green salad. One of the little piles should be served to each person. Probable cost, uncertain.
An assembled composed salad rather than a cooked dish, so the work is all in the knifework and the piping. A few of the terms are Victorian shorthand.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked pepper, usually white or a white-and-black mix; the name is generally explained as a reference to the grains resembling mignonette seed. A few turns of a coarse-set mill or pepper crushed under a pan base gives the same effect; fine-ground pepper disappears into the beetroot and loses the point.
- BeetrootThe recipe takes for granted that the beetroot is already cooked and peeled; ready-boiled beetroot was commonly available. Vacuum-packed cooked beets work; avoid beets in sweetened vinegar, since the dressing supplies the acid.
- Crimped cutterA fluted round cutter, about 1 to 1.5 inches. Slice the beet 1/8 inch thick and stamp the rounds; a plain cutter or a knife does the job if less decoratively.
- Forcing-bag and pipeA piping bag with a small star or plain tube. The yolk-and-mayonnaise mixture needs to be worked smooth through a sieve first, or it will block the tube.
- AnchoviesSalt-packed or oil-packed fillets, rinsed, then left in lemon juice for 20 to 30 minutes to soften the salt and firm the flesh. Cut them lengthwise into thin strips before they go on.
- OlivesLarge green olives, pitted rather than sliced, so there is a cavity to fill. Pit them yourself if you can; pre-pitted olives are often split and will not hold the filling.
- MayonnaiseThe mayonnaise here is uncooked and egg-based. Use a commercial jarred mayonnaise or one made with pasteurised egg if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Dish-paperA cut paper doily laid on the serving dish. Purely presentational, and easily left out.
- Yield and assemblyBuild the beetroot rounds into small individual piles around a mound of dressed green leaves, one pile per person; the recipe gives no quantities, so scale to the number of guests. Assemble not long before serving, as the beetroot bleeds into the mayonnaise.
- On the cost line"Probable cost, uncertain" recurs elsewhere in the book, seemingly where quantities are left to the cook, rather than being an omission here.
"Italian salad" in late-Victorian English cookery books rarely meant anything eaten in Italy; it was a catch-all for a cold composed salad arranged in a pattern, usually involving beetroot, hard-boiled egg, anchovy or other salted fish, olives and a mayonnaise or oil-and-vinegar dressing, in the manner of the French salade italienne and its relatives. The style belongs to the age of the piping bag and the sieve, when a household cook with pretensions to haute cuisine was expected to turn cheap ingredients into architecture: pounded yolk forced through a tube, beetroot stamped with a crimped cutter, everything set on a paper doily. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, which dates from the later 1870s and was reissued for decades in expanded form as the New Dictionary of Cookery, catalogued such small savoury arrangements for the cold table and the supper buffet, where a dish had to look composed at room temperature and survive an hour of standing.