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Pepper and Salt (Cut the partridge into neat)
Cut the partridge into neat joints; remove the skin and most of the bones; put the meat in a dish, season with pepper and salt, and pour the vinaigrette over it; keep it in a cool place for about an hour or more.
Wash the lettuce and celery; remove the green leaves, and shred the white portion. Season a little. Dress the lettuce, celery, and partridge in alternate layers in the shape of a dome or pyramid on a salad-bowl; mask with stiff mayonnaise.
Decorate the surface with fanciful slices and strips of gherkin and truffle. Surround with a garnish of quartered hard-boiled eggs, French olives, and capers, and serve.
A late-Victorian game salad, built as a dome and masked with mayonnaise in the French manner. The book assumes a cook who already has cold roast birds on hand, so the most important step is the one it never states.
- The partridge must already be cookedNothing here cooks the bird: the joints go straight into vinaigrette and then into the salad. This is a leftovers dish, built on partridge that has been roasted through and cooled. Raw or underdone game marinated in vinegar is not made safe by the acid.
- Vinaigrette here means a plain dressingIn this period vinaigrette is oil and vinegar seasoned with pepper and salt, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, sometimes with a little chopped shallot or herb. It is used as a brief marinade, not a sauce, and an hour in a cool place is enough.
- Stiff mayonnaiseMasking requires a mayonnaise thick enough to coat and hold its shape on a sloped surface. Make it on the firm side with a high proportion of oil to yolk; a thin commercial mayonnaise will slide off the dome. Some kitchens of the era set it with a little aspic for the same reason.
- Truffle and gherkin decorationThe truffle would most likely be black, cut into thin discs and strips for contrast against the white mayonnaise. Preserved truffle peelings or a very small tinned truffle do the same visual job; failing that, blanched leek green, radish and gherkin give the same graphic effect at a fraction of the cost.
- French olivesGreen olives in brine, not the cured black olives now more common. Buy them whole and unpitted if possible and pit them yourself for a firmer olive.
- The celery and lettuceOnly the pale inner ribs and the blanched heart are used, finely shredded. Cos or a firm crisphead lettuce holds up under mayonnaise; soft butterhead collapses. Shred and dress it at the last moment or the dome weeps.
- Assembly and timingBuild the pyramid on a shallow bowl or a footed dish, drain the partridge well of its vinaigrette first, and chill the finished salad no more than an hour before serving. Longer, and the mayonnaise skins and the salad slumps.
- YieldOne partridge, boned, serves one as a light main course or two as a first course. Two birds with the full garnish of eggs, olives and capers will fill a salad bowl for four.
Cold game dressed in mayonnaise and piled into a dome was a fixture of the British and French shooting-season table, appearing on menus as salade de gibier or mayonnaise de perdreau. Its logic is thrift dressed as luxury: partridge came into the kitchen in quantity between September and January, and yesterday's roast birds, boned and re-presented under a white coat with truffle cut into stars and crescents, could be sent to the table as a new dish. The pyramid shape, the masking with a set sauce, and the border of hard-boiled egg, olive and caper all belong to the grand French service that British "high class" cookery books of the period were teaching to professional cooks and ambitious households; the same construction was applied to salmon, lobster and chicken. The truffle is the tell that this was written for a kitchen with a budget behind it.