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Poet's Recipe for Salad (Generally ascribed to the Rev. Sydney Smith.)
"Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve, Softness and smoothness to the salad give; Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment which bites too soon; Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault To add a double quantity of salt; Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, And twice with vinegar procured from town; The flavor needs it, and your poet begs The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs; Let onions' atoms lurk within the bowl, And, scarce suspected, animate the whole; And, lastly, in the flavored compound toss A magic teaspoon of anchovy sauce. Oh, great and glorious! Oh, herbaceous meat! "Twould tempt the dying anchoret to eat; Back to the world he'd turn his weary soul, And dip his finger in the salad-bowl. Then, though green turtle fail, though venison's tough, And ham and turkey are not boiled enough, Serenely full, the epicure may say: `Fate cannot harm me-I have dined to-day.'"
The verse gives a genuine working formula, but the ratios need reading carefully before you commit: the mustard, salt, oil and vinegar are all counted in spoons against one another, and the salt is the one figure a modern cook should ignore.
- The proportions, in orderTwo boiled potatoes sieved; one spoon mustard; two spoons salt; four spoons oil; two spoons vinegar; the sieved yolks of two hard-boiled eggs; minced onion; one teaspoon anchovy sauce. The oil-to-vinegar ratio of 4:2 is a conventional 2:1 dressing.
- A spoon is not specifiedSmith never says whether he means a teaspoon or a tablespoon. Taken as teaspoons the batch is small; taken as tablespoons it dresses a large bowl. The anchovy is explicitly a teaspoon, which suggests the others are the larger spoon.
- Halve the salt, or leave it out"A double quantity of salt" — two spoons — is far too much against two potatoes and a teaspoon of anchovy sauce, which is itself salty. Season at the end, by taste.
- Sieve the potatoes hotWarm floury potatoes push through a sieve or ricer into dry fluff; cold ones turn gluey. Do this first, then work in the mustard and yolks before any liquid goes near it.
- Build it as an emulsionAdd the oil to the potato-and-yolk paste a little at a time, beating, then let the vinegar down at the end. Reversing the order gives a thin, split dressing rather than the "softness and smoothness" promised.
- Oil of LuccaOlive oil from Lucca in Tuscany, the premium oil of the period. Any good fruity extra-virgin oil stands in; the point is that the oil is tasted, not neutral.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled anchovy condiment, closer to Worcestershire than to paste. A scant half-teaspoon of anchovy paste loosened with a little vinegar reads much the same.
- Onion "atoms"The word is doing work: grate or mince the onion to near-invisibility, or use onion juice only. Recognisable pieces of raw onion defeat the "scarce suspected" effect.
- Yield and servingRead as tablespoons it dresses enough lettuce for six. It stiffens as the potato cools, so thin with a spoon of water or vinegar and dress the leaves just before they go to table.
Sydney Smith (1771–1845) was an English clergyman, a founder of the Edinburgh Review, and by common consent the most quoted wit of his generation; his "Recipe for a Salad" was among the most widely reprinted comic poems of the nineteenth century, which is how it reaches an American subscription cookery set some sixty years after his death, printed without comment among the plain salad dressings. Verse recipes were a recognised genre, and a poem could be copied into a commonplace book and passed hand to hand. What Smith describes is a potato-thickened, egg-enriched dressing, the sieved potato doing work that mayonnaise later took over. Two of his words have gone dark: oil of Lucca is olive oil from Lucca in Tuscany, then the byword for the finest, and an anchoret is an anchorite, a hermit who has renounced food along with everything else. The closing line, "Fate cannot harm me — I have dined to-day," outlived the recipe and is still quoted on its own.