Home › The Principles of Cookery › Salmagundi
Salmagundi
A salmagundi is a sort of mosaic made with pickled herring, cold dressed chicken, salt beef, radishes, endive, olives, etc., all arranged with regard to contrast in colour as well as flavour, and served with oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt. The following is a good recipe for a salmagundi. Take a large round dish; place in the centre a bunch of fresh endive, and lay round it strips of herring or anchovy, interspersed with neat slices from the breast of a chicken. Put round these a band of hard-boiled yolk of egg chopped small, then one of green parsley, then slices of red beef or tongue, then the white of egg, and lastly a garland of sprigs of water-cress. Insert trimmed olives, green capers, radishes, barberries, etc., wherever they will be most effective. Serve with salad sauce. Sometimes the herrings for a salmagundi are opened, and the flesh is taken out without injuring the skin. It is then minced with an equal quantity of cold chicken and grated ham or tongue, seasoned rather highly, and put back into the skins till they look plump and of a good shape.
A composed cold platter rather than a cooked dish, so the work is all in the sourcing and the arrangement. Two things decide whether it succeeds: everything must be cold and dry before it goes on the dish, and the dressing must not touch it until it reaches the table.
- Dress at the last momentOil and vinegar poured over the platter early will bleed the beef and tongue into the egg and wilt the cress within minutes. Bring the sauce separately in a boat and let people dress their own portion.
- "Salad sauce"In practice a period oil-and-vinegar dressing: broadly three parts oil to one of vinegar, seasoned with salt and pepper, and in many Victorian versions mustard, a mashed hard-boiled yolk or a little cream. Nothing here requires a separate recipe.
- EndiveA Victorian British cookbook means curly endive or escarole, the frizzy salad head, not the pale Belgian chicory sold as endive today. Frisée or escarole gives the intended bushy centre; witloof spears will not.
- BarberriesPickled barberries were a common Victorian garnish and are now uncommon in Britain and the United States, where barberry was cleared as a host of wheat rust. Dried Iranian barberries (zereshk), plumped in a little vinegar, or pomegranate seeds give the same sharp red points.
- The herringUse cured fish, not fresh: pickled or salt herring, or good anchovy fillets. Salt herring needs soaking in cold water or milk for several hours and a taste before use, or the whole dish reads as brine.
- Chicken and tongue"Cold dressed chicken" simply means chicken already cooked, roast bird being the usual source; the breast slices cleanly and is what the recipe wants. Salt beef or pressed ox tongue supplies the red band, and a good deli pastrami or corned beef stands in without argument.
- The stuffed-herring variationSkinning a cured herring in one piece is fiddly work: slit along the back, lift the fillets, and keep the belly skin intact. The mince is equal parts fish and cold chicken with grated ham or tongue, seasoned hard because it will be eaten fridge-cold, when salt and pepper read weaker.
- Yield and keepingBuilt on a large round platter it will serve roughly six to eight as a lunch or supper dish. Assemble no more than an hour or so ahead and keep it refrigerated; the cooked meats and egg are the perishable part.
The name descends from the French salmigondis, a medley or hotchpotch, and by the later seventeenth century it had crossed into English for a dish of many small cold things arranged together \em>Art of Cookery gives a "Salamongundy" of much the same kind, and the word had already drifted into general use for any jumble, which is why Washington Irving and his collaborators called their 1807 magazine Salmagundi. The entry is really a lesson in composition: a Victorian household with a cold roast fowl, a piece of tongue and a jar of pickles could turn remnants into something that looked deliberate, and the instruction to arrange "with regard to contrast in colour as well as flavour" is the point of the exercise. The concentric bands of chopped yolk, parsley and white are the same decorative grammar that produced garnished cold entrées and moulded aspics on the late-century buffet table.