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SALAD RUSSE (Russian Salad)
Take one cauliflower, three small potatoes, and two tomatoes, a carrot, a turnip, and some French beans. Cook separately in salted water the various vegetables, previously prepared, the carrot and turnip cut up into small dice or stars, the cauliflower divided into sprigs or buds, the potatoes cut into neat short strips: use the tomatoes in slices, raw. When all are cooked, drain well, and put in layers in a large basin or salad-bowl. Season with pepper, salt, and a pinch of castor sugar. Arrange the whole of the ingredients in distinct sections or layers, together with one truffle and two gherkins cut into fine shreds. Cover each layer with mayonnaise sauce. Smooth over neatly with mayonnaise. Decorate according to fancy with shredded smoked salmon, beetroot, olives, anchovies, capers, or truffles. Probable cost, 2s.
A composed vegetable salad bound with mayonnaise, built in visible layers rather than tossed. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how the vegetables are cooked and cooled, so treat that as the real work.
- Cook separately, and stop earlyEach vegetable goes into its own pan of salted water so nothing overcooks or bleeds colour. Carrot and turnip dice want 4-6 minutes, cauliflower sprigs 4-5, green beans 3-4, potato strips 6-8 — all just tender, since anything softer collapses when the mayonnaise goes on.
- Cool completely before layeringDrain, spread on a tray and let the vegetables go cold and dry. Warm vegetables thin mayonnaise and it will slump through the layers instead of holding them apart.
- French beansOrdinary green beans, topped, tailed and cut into short lengths.
- Castor sugarSuperfine (caster) sugar. The pinch belongs to the seasoning of the layers, alongside the pepper and salt, rather than sweetening the dish; granulated works if you dissolve it in the seasoning.
- The tomatoesSliced raw and layered in, they shed liquid into the mayonnaise. Salt the slices, drain them on paper for 10 minutes, and place them near the top so any weeping stays where you can see it.
- TruffleThe single truffle would have been black truffle, fresh or, as often in this period, preserved; more readily had in a well-provisioned Victorian kitchen than today, though not a cheap ingredient then either. A small jar of truffle peelings, or simply more gherkin and olive, keeps the salad honest; skip truffle oil.
- MayonnaiseThe recipe assumes house-made mayonnaise on raw yolks. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise loosened with lemon juice.
- Probable cost2s is two shillings, a tenth of a pound sterling — the book's own guide to relative expense rather than any figure convertible to today's prices.
- YieldThe book states none; the quantities suggest roughly six as a first course or side. Build it in a straight-sided glass bowl so the sections show, and dress the surface no more than an hour before serving.
Salad Russe, or salade russe, belongs to the same family as the mayonnaise-bound vegetable salads still eaten across Europe under a dozen names — Russian salad in Britain, ensaladilla rusa in Spain, Olivier salad in Russia itself; the lines of descent between them are not settled. The form is often traced to the restaurant cooking of nineteenth-century Russia, where French-trained chefs worked for aristocratic households, though the attribution is not certain, and it became one of the standard hors d'oeuvre of the grand repertoire in British and French kitchens. What is striking in Cassell's version is the emphasis on distinct sections or layers: this is not the roughly mixed bowl of diced vegetables familiar from later delicatessen counters but a decorated centrepiece, and the list of garnishes — smoked salmon, anchovy, caper, truffle — suggests a cold buffet table where appearance did as much work as flavour. The many small quantities also suggest a kitchen with staff to prepare them.