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Salsify in Salad or Aspic
Take salsifies enough to fill a mould of the size of the dish on which the salad is to be served, then boil them in the usual way; drain and cut them the length of the mould; dress them like a chartreuse, dip them into a little aspic to stick them together all round the mould, and fill the middle with a salad of small bits of salsifies all the same size; then season with salt, pepper, a little oil, vinegar and aspic; put in also some parsley chopped very fine; toss the whole, and put the mould into ice. At dinner dip a rubber into hot water, rub the mould all round with it, and turn the salad out on a dish to serve up. If you can procure a few French beans very green, they will make the salad appear better; while haricot beans are likewise very useful.
A Victorian moulded salad that depends entirely on the aspic: too weak and it collapses, too strong and it eats like rubber. The instructions assume you already know how to line a mould, so the detail below fills in what Cassell's leaves out.
- Salsify, and keeping it whiteSalsify (oyster plant) blackens within minutes of peeling. Drop the peeled roots straight into water acidulated with lemon juice or vinegar. The recipe says only "boil them in the usual way" and does not specify how; one common treatment was a blanc — water with a spoonful of flour whisked in plus lemon juice — though salted acidulated water was also used. Twenty to thirty minutes for pencil-thick roots, until a knife meets no resistance.
- "Dress them like a chartreuse"A chartreuse mould is lined with vegetables laid in a regular pattern against the wall before the filling goes in. Here: chill the mould, pour in a thin film of nearly-set aspic, then press the cut lengths of salsify upright around the sides so they set into it. Line the base first, work upward, and let each layer firm before adding the next.
- Aspic strengthA savoury jelly for unmoulding needs roughly 1 oz (about 4 sachets, 28 g) powdered gelatine per quart of well-flavoured clarified stock, rather less if the stock is gelatinous from veal bones or a pig's trotter. Victorian aspic was generally got from a naturally gelatinous stock — calf's feet were usual — sometimes reinforced with isinglass or gelatine; a good chilled homemade stock plus supplementary gelatine gives the same result. Season the aspic more sharply than tastes right warm — cold blunts salt and acid.
- The dressing inside the mouldOil, vinegar and aspic together will not set cleanly if the oil is heavy-handed. Use no more than a tablespoon of oil to two of aspic for the interior salad, toss the diced salsify while the aspic is syrupy but not set, and fill the lined mould at once.
- "Put the mould into ice"An ice cave or a bowl of ice and salt. The refrigerator does the job: three to four hours for a pint mould, longer for anything larger. It must be fully set through, not just at the edges.
- "Dip a rubber into hot water"A rubber here is a cloth, not the material. Wring a cloth out in hot water and wrap it round the mould for a few seconds, or dip the mould to its rim in hot water for five to eight seconds. Longer and the outer layer of aspic melts and the pattern smears.
- French beans and haricotsFrench beans are green beans; blanch two minutes and refresh in iced water to keep the colour the recipe is after. "Haricot beans" in nineteenth-century English usage generally meant the dried white bean, cooked soft — useful for bulk in the centre, not for the lining, though the recipe does not say which is intended.
- YieldA 1 times-pint mould would serve about six as a first course or side salad; the recipe itself sizes the mould to the dish and gives no quantity. It is a cold entr e for a laid table, not a dish to hold at room temperature; return leftovers to the refrigerator promptly.
Salsify was a standard kitchen-garden root in nineteenth-century Britain and France, valued for a faint shellfish note that earned it the name oyster plant, and it appears throughout Victorian cookery books in ways that would now seem lavish for a root vegetable. This recipe belongs to the age of the moulded aspic entrée, when a household with ice and a copper mould could turn almost anything into a glittering centrepiece — the technique matters more than the ingredient, and the same instructions served for asparagus, prawns or chicken. The chartreuse construction it borrows is generally traced to French professional practice, where vegetables were arranged decoratively against the mould wall before the filling was added; it seems to have been developed as a showpiece in the early nineteenth-century French kitchen, and later manuals like Cassell's passed it down to the middle-class kitchen. Salsify's decline in Britain is usually put down to the fiddly peeling and the mess it makes of the hands, though it never left the French market garden.