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Vegetable Salads
The remains of cooked vegetables of almost every kind may be advantageously served as a salad. The vegetables should be sliced or minced, according to their nature, seasoned with pepper and salt, and worked lightly together with oil and vinegar, in the proportion of two table-spoonfuls of the former to one of the latter. Vegetable salads should be prepared an hour or two before they are wanted, so that the vegetables may become thoroughly impregnated with the sauce. By way of variety, cold meat or fish may be introduced; and hard-boiled eggs, sliced beetroot, etc., may be used for garnish.
A method rather than a fixed recipe: a dressing formula and a licence to use up whatever cooked vegetables are in the larder. A few of its assumptions need adjusting.
- "The remains" means leftoversThe dish is built on cold cooked vegetables from a previous meal — boiled potatoes, carrots, French beans, peas, cauliflower, beetroot. Anything boiled to the soft side works better here than crisp-tender modern vegetables, which can taste underdone when cold and dressed.
- The dressing ratio is sharper than modern tasteTwo spoons of oil to one of vinegar is a 2:1 vinaigrette; current practice is nearer 3:1 or 4:1. If that is sharper than you like, start at 3:1 and add vinegar to taste.
- Oil and vinegar, unemulsified"Worked lightly together" means tossed, not whisked into a stable emulsion. Season the vegetables with salt and pepper first, add the oil to coat, then the vinegar — that way the acid does not slide straight off oiled surfaces.
- The hour or two of standingThis is the point of the dish: root vegetables and potatoes absorb dressing as they sit, and taste flat if dressed at the table. Do the resting in the refrigerator rather than on the kitchen table, and bring it back to cool room temperature before serving.
- Cold meat or fishIf you add cooked meat or fish, treat the whole bowl as a perishable dish: keep it chilled, serve it the same day, and do not let it stand out through a long meal. The book was written for cold larders and daily marketing, not for a salad that sits out all afternoon.
- Watery vegetablesSalted cucumber, tomato or cooked marrow will weep into the dressing over the resting hour and dilute it. Drain them separately, or add them at the last moment with a little extra oil.
- Beetroot as garnish, not mixed inIt is listed with the garnishes rather than the salad proper: stirred through, it stains everything magenta within minutes. Slice it and lay it round the edge just before serving.
- QuantityNo yield is given because there is none — dress what you have. As a rough guide, the book's two tablespoons of oil to one of vinegar will lightly coat about a pound of cooked vegetables.
This is really a rule of household economy: nothing cooked need be thrown away while oil and vinegar remain in the house. The dressed-vegetable salad with hard-boiled egg and beetroot garnish sits close to the French salade russe and macédoine, which are generally said to have reached British kitchens through restaurant and hotel cooking in the later nineteenth century, and the addition of cold meat or fish turns the same formula into the luncheon dishes that would later be called simply a fish salad or a chicken salad. The instruction to dress an hour or two ahead is sound and still worth following: it is the one technical point in the entry, and it distinguishes a salad from a bowl of cold vegetables with dressing poured over.