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Plain Salad
Ingredients.
Lettuces, Watercress, Mustard and Cress, Endive, Cucumber, Celery, a little of each.
Beetroot. One or two Spring Onions.
Two tablespoonfuls of the best Salad Oil.
One tablespoonful of Tarragon Vinegar.
An ingredient list rather than a method, in the manner of the period: the assembly was assumed known. The proportions of the dressing are the only real instruction, and they are worth reading closely.
- The dressing is sharper than modern habitTwo parts oil to one part vinegar is a 2:1 ratio, where modern vinaigrettes are commonly made at 3:1 or 4:1. Mix and taste before it goes near the leaves, and add salt and pepper, which the list omits.
- "Best salad oil"In late Victorian and Edwardian usage this meant a good olive oil, sold specifically for the table as distinct from cooking oils. A mild extra-virgin olive oil is the closest thing; a strongly peppery one will fight the tarragon.
- Mustard and cressSeedling white mustard and garden cress, cut a week or two after sowing, and the Victorian equivalent of microgreens. Substitute any peppery microgreen or add extra watercress rather than mustard leaves, which are much coarser.
- EndiveBritish books of this date mean curly endive (frisée) or batavia, not the pale Belgian chicory spears sold as endive in the United States. Either works, but frisée gives the intended bitterness.
- The beetroot is cookedThe beetroot is almost certainly cooked -- no quantity is given and no cooking is mentioned, boiled beetroot being a common larder standby of the period. Use cooked beets, sliced or diced, and keep them separate until serving or the whole bowl turns pink.
- Tarragon vinegarWhite wine vinegar steeped with fresh tarragon; still sold, and easily made by leaving a few sprigs in a bottle of white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a little chopped tarragon is an acceptable stand-in.
- Dry the leaves, dress at the tableThe hinge of any oil-dressed salad: water on the leaves stops the oil adhering and dilutes the vinegar. Spin or towel the greens thoroughly and toss only as it goes out.
- Yield"a little of each" of six salad plants with three tablespoons of dressing makes, at a rough estimate, a bowl for three or four as a side salad.
"Plain salad" here appears to mean unadorned rather than simple: no mayonnaise, no boiled cream dressing, no aspic or moulded garnish, just raw salad plants and a dressing of oil and vinegar. British writers of the period often compared their own salad-making unfavourably with the French, and the call for good oil and a flavoured vinegar rather than an egg-thickened dressing sits with that taste. The list of plants is also a portrait of what a well-supplied kitchen garden or good greengrocer could produce at once: lettuce, watercress, seedling mustard and cress, endive, cucumber and celery, with boiled beetroot standing ready in the larder. Mustard and cress was a household crop, sown on damp flannel or fine soil in a shallow box and cut young, which is why it appears so often in books of this era and so rarely in ours.