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Bohemian Salad
Cover the bottom of a salad dish with crisp lettuce leaves; put over the top alternate slices of boiled beets and hard-boiled eggs; sprinkle with one tablespoon of chopped onion and serve with French dressing.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the instructions assume you already know how to boil a beet and make a French dressing. Two things carry it: cold components and dressing added at the table.
- Dress at the last momentBeet juice bleeds into everything it touches once it meets oil and acid. Arrange the slices, bring it to the table, and pour the dressing on there, or the whole dish turns uniformly pink within minutes.
- French dressing, 1911 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. It means a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, whisked with salt and pepper, often with a little mustard. Make about 1/3 cup for this quantity.
- Boiling the beetsSmall beets, unpeeled with an inch of stem left on so they do not bleed out, take 35-50 minutes in simmering water depending on size. Cool before peeling and slicing. Drained canned beets are a legitimate shortcut here since they are only being sliced and dressed.
- The eggsFirm yolks slice cleanly; overcooked ones crumble and go grey at the edge. Twelve minutes in gently boiling water, then straight into cold water, gives you slices that hold together on the beet.
- The onionA tablespoon of raw onion over a small salad is assertive by modern taste. Chop it fine and rinse it in cold water, then pat dry, if you want the flavour without the sting.
- "Salad dish"A shallow bowl or a platter, not a deep mixing bowl. The point is that the alternating rings of beet and egg stay visible.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities beyond the tablespoon of onion, so the amount is up to you. A workable starting point is one egg and one medium beet per two people, which makes a side salad for about four.
This comes from Good Things to Eat (1911) by Rufus Estes, a formerly enslaved man who became a Pullman dining-car cook and later ran the private kitchen for the subsidiary companies of United States Steel in Chicago — it is often described as the first cookbook by an African American professional chef, though earlier cookbooks by African American authors exist, among them Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cook Book (1866) and Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881). The name looks more like a period label than a geographical one: "Bohemian" turns up in American cookbooks of the era attached fairly loosely to dishes felt to be Central European, and beets with hard-boiled egg and onion does gesture at the Czech and Polish table, though nothing in the method is specifically Bohemian. It also suggests something about how a salad like this would be handled in a professional dining room: arranged rather than tossed, built from things already cooked and chilled, and dressed at the last moment so a plate could be assembled quickly and still look composed at the table.