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Chopped Tarragon
Sugar. Salt. Cut the vegetables and fruit into fancy shapes or dice. Add the cream to the mayonnaise sauce and flavour it with the elder vinegar, sugar, and salt. Mix in the fruit and vegetables and pour all into a salad bowl. Garnish with shredded celery and sprinkle with chopped tarragon.
Note. This salad is suitable to serve with game.
Seakale. Tie the seakale up in small bundles, put it into boiling water with some salt, and boil it for twenty minutes, till quite tender. Untie the bundles, dish it up on a slice of toast, and hand, separately, melted butter with a few drops of lemon-juice in it.
The page as printed is a fragment: the salad's ingredient list has been lost, leaving only the tail of the method and the start of a separate seakale entry. Both are workable if you read them as a dressing technique and a vegetable course rather than as complete recipes.
- The missing ingredient listOnly "Sugar. Salt." survives of the salad's quantities. From the method it is a mayonnaise-and-cream dressing over diced or fancy-cut vegetables and fruit; the book does not say which, so anything of the apple, celery, beetroot and cooked-root type is guesswork on our part. Treat the amounts as your own judgement, not the book's.
- Elder vinegarA vinegar flavoured with elder, usually the flowers though elderberry versions were also made, and now rarely sold. Elderflower cordial let down with a good white wine vinegar gets close; plain white wine vinegar with a pinch more sugar is an acceptable substitute.
- Cream in the mayonnaiseAdd the cream slowly and only just before serving. A slackened mayonnaise will split if worked hard or held warm, and it will thin further as the fruit and vegetables give up juice.
- Raw eggHomemade mayonnaise is uncooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or a good bought mayonnaise loosened with cream.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn British cookery of this period melted butter means a thin white sauce of butter, flour and water or stock, not simply butter melted in a pan. That is what is meant to be handed separately with the seakale, sharpened with lemon juice.
- Twenty minutes is too longSeakale is tender in roughly 8 to 12 minutes in well-salted boiling water, depending on thickness. Twenty minutes gives grey, collapsing stems. Test with a knife tip at the base of the bundle.
- Sourcing seakaleCrambe maritima is a seasonal, mostly forced vegetable sold in late winter and early spring, usually as pale blanched shoots. Where it is unavailable, the same treatment suits salsify, cardoon or thick white asparagus, all of which want the same short boil and butter sauce.
- ServingSeakale on toast is a vegetable course or savoury; a pound of trimmed stems is about right for four, though the book gives no quantity. The salad, as the note says, is "suitable to serve with game" rather than to stand alone.
Seakale is one of the few vegetables genuinely native to British cookery: a wild cabbage relative that grows on shingle beaches, where coastal gatherers are traditionally said to have noticed that stems buried by drifting pebbles came up pale and mild. Gardeners copied the trick with pots and sand from the eighteenth century onward, and forced seakale became a fashionable winter vegetable, sold in Covent Garden and grown in kitchen gardens. Serving it in tied bundles on toast with melted butter recalls the way asparagus was handled, and the two appear side by side in Victorian and Edwardian menus. The salad alongside it belongs to the same book's other world u the elaborate cold accompaniments of the professional cook's repertoire, where vegetables and fruit were cut to shape, bound in a cream-slackened mayonnaise, and flavoured with one of the many infused vinegars, elder among them, that a well-run larder kept on hand.