Olga Petrova
SALAD "PETROVA" Hearts of endive split lengthwise with sliced beets and hard-boiled egg, truffle and white of egg Julienne, French dressing.
Yours with best wishes, Courtesy of Oscar of the Waldorf.
Celebrity Olga trong
IRISH STEW
Wipe and cut in pieces three pounds of lamb. Cover with boiling water and cook slowly about two hours or until tender.
After cooking one hour, add half a cup diced carrots, turnips, and parsnips. Slice an onion and add that. Half an hour before serving add four cups potatoes, cut in half-inch slices.
Thicken with one-fourth cup flour, made into a smooth paste with cold water.
This is very nice for a "17th of March" or other celebration.
Sincerely yours,
Two dishes from one contributor: a composed salad built to a Waldorf pattern and a plain lamb stew. Neither is difficult, but both assume knowledge the page does not spell out.
- Endive here is Belgian endiveEndive here is most likely Belgian endive -- "Hearts of endive split lengthwise" reads as whole heads of witloof chicory halved from root to tip rather than the frizzy curly endive sold as frisee, though the page does not say which. No quantities are given at all; figure roughly two small heads per person.
- French dressingIn this period the term meant a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. It does not mean the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Truffle and white of egg julienneBoth are presumably cut into fine matchsticks; the list can be read as sliced hard-boiled egg in the salad and egg white cut julienne with the truffle, though the page does not spell this out. A very small amount of black truffle goes a long way, a few thin shavings is plenty.
- BeetsCooked and cooled beets, sliced. Dress them separately and drain before plating or they will bleed pink across the endive.
- Stew: no browningThe lamb goes straight into boiling water, which produces a pale, mild broth rather than a browned one. If you brown the meat first you have made a different dish, which is fine, but the two-hour simmer then wants watching for dryness.
- Cut of lambThree pounds bone-in shoulder or neck is what this wants. Boneless leg will be tender well before two hours and gives a thinner broth.
- Keep it at a bare simmer"Cook slowly" is the hinge. A rolling boil shreds the lamb and clouds the liquid; hold it just below a simmer, lid ajar.
- The flour pasteA quarter cup of flour slaked in cold water goes in at the end. Add it in a thin stream while stirring and let the stew bubble two or three minutes afterward, or it will taste of raw flour.
- YieldThree pounds of lamb with four cups of potatoes feeds six generously. Both dishes want more salt than the text suggests: season the broth once the vegetables are in, not at the start.
Olga Petrova's salad arrives "courtesy of Oscar of the Waldorf" — Oscar Tschirky, the hotel's long-serving maître d'hôtel, whose name was attached to a good deal of the hotel's cooking in the first decades of the twentieth century. That a performer's signature contribution to a celebrity cookbook should come with someone else's name on it is very much of its moment: the vamp persona, the invented Russian past, and the salad are all part of the same construction. The Irish stew is the plainer document. Traditional Irish stew is mutton, potato and onion in water and nothing else; the carrots, turnips and parsnips here, and the flour thickening at the end, suggest an American household version, and the note about the seventeenth of March adds a festive framing associated with Irish-American holiday cooking.