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Spanish Salad
Put into the centre of a dish some cold dressed French beans, and at the moment of serving stir them up lightly with a little mayonnaise sauce or salad cream of any kind. Garnish the beans with three or four ripe tomatoes cut in slices and arranged in a circle, one slice overlapping another. If preferred, and more convenient, cold dressed Windsor beans, haricot beans, or green peas, or a mixture of all or any of these, may be used instead of French beans.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it depends entirely on the beans being properly cooked and properly dressed before the mayonnaise goes anywhere near them.
- "Cold dressed" is the hingeIn Victorian usage "dressed" generally means cooked and prepared beforehand, and here it probably implies beans boiled, drained and tossed with oil and vinegar before cooling, though the recipe does not spell this out. Warm beans absorb a dressing better than cold ones, and beans put in undressed leave you with plain beans in mayonnaise.
- French beansGreen beans, topped and tailed. Boil in well-salted water 4-5 minutes until just tender, then drain and dress at once. Boiled until soft they give a grey, limp salad.
- Windsor beansBroad beans, now more often sold as fava. Older large ones want their skins slipped off after cooking; the grey inner skin is tough and bitter.
- Haricot beansHere the dried white bean, soaked and simmered, not a green bean. Tinned cannellini or butter beans, well rinsed, do the same job.
- Salad cream of any kindCassell's assumed a kitchen-made mayonnaise or a boiled salad dressing. Any good jarred mayonnaise works; if you make your own, use pasteurised egg, since nothing in this dish is cooked afterwards.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction to stir in the mayonnaise "at the moment of serving" is deliberate. Acid in the dressing dulls the colour of green beans and peas fairly quickly, and the mayonnaise loosens as the vegetables weep.
- TomatoesSlice thinly, salt lightly, and let them drain on kitchen paper for a few minutes so the water does not run into the mayonnaise. Three or four medium tomatoes will ring a dinner-plate-sized mound.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Roughly 1 lb (450 g) of cooked beans with the three or four tomatoes would serve about four as a side salad.
The name says less about Spain than about the tomato, which in late-Victorian British cookery is often said to have carried a broadly Mediterranean or "Spanish" association. The recipe is really a demonstration of a method: cook a vegetable, dress it warm, chill it, bind it lightly at the table. The list of permitted substitutes — French beans, Windsor beans, haricots, green peas, or any mixture — is characteristic of the dictionary's approach, which treats a recipe as a template to be fitted to whatever the larder holds.