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Salade à la Dumas
Cut into coarse shreds or thin slices one small cucumber (previously pickled), one small cooked beetroot, three cooked potatoes, and four fresh tomatoes. Set these on one side, and prepare a dressing as follows:
Rub one hard-boiled yolk of egg through a sieve into a salad bowl; add a tablespoonful of Tartare sauce, one small teaspoonful of salt, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Mix well, and work in gradually two tablespoonsful of salad oil, one of French wine vinegar, and a dessertspoonful of anchovy essence. Add the prepared vegetables, and mix carefully.
Dish up in a clean salad bowl in a raised form.
Place the heart of a nice French lettuce in the centre; ornament with chopped hard-boiled eggs, chopped chervil and parsley, and a few French capers.
A composed vinaigrette salad in the Anglo-French style, built around an emulsified egg-yolk dressing rather than a shaken one. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the measures and one or two ingredients no longer sold under these names.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, or about 10 ml. A tablespoonful in a British book of this vintage is close to the modern 15 ml tablespoon, and the dressing as written comes to roughly a third of a cup in total.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract once sold in bottles alongside mushroom ketchup. Mashed anchovy fillets or anchovy paste thinned with a little of the vinegar gives the same effect; if you substitute Worcestershire sauce, use less, as it is sharper and more spiced.
- Tartare sauceAt this period this meant a mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, gherkin and herbs, made in the kitchen. A good jarred tartare works, but taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, since commercial versions are already salted.
- Pickled cucumberThe instruction means a cucumber pickled in vinegar, not a sweet gherkin. Use a dill or salt pickle; a sweet pickle will unbalance the dressing entirely.
- Build the dressing in orderThe sieved yolk and tartare sauce are the emulsifier. Work the oil in slowly, a little at a time, before the vinegar goes in, or the dressing will break and slide off the vegetables.
- Beetroot last, and lateBeetroot bleeds into potato and tomato within minutes. Fold it in at the very end and dress the salad no more than a quarter of an hour before it goes to table, or the whole bowl turns uniformly pink.
- French lettuceProbably a cabbage or butterhead type, of which only the pale inner heart is used. The point is a firm, blanched heart that sits upright in the mound of dressed vegetables.
- Dish up in a raised formPile the vegetables into a dome rather than spreading them flat, then set the lettuce heart on top and scatter the chopped egg, herbs and capers over. Drain off any dressing that pools at the base first.
- YieldServes four as a first course or side salad. Chervil is worth seeking out for its faint aniseed note, but parsley alone is acceptable.
Dishes styled à la Dumas honour Alexandre Dumas père, whose posthumous Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873) secured him a reputation as a serious enthusiast of the table as well as a novelist. The whole construction is characteristic of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchens in Britain, where French terminology, a sieved-yolk dressing and a carefully built "raised form" garnished with chopped egg and herbs signalled that a trained cook, not a plain one, had been at work.