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Salade à la Russe
Ingredients.
About a pint of Jardinière of Vegetables.
Six Anchovies, filleted.
A few slices of Smoked Salmon.
Two tablespoonfuls of Russian Caviare.
About a quart of Aspic Jelly.
Twelve picked Prawns, or Crayfish.
One gill of firm Mayonnaise Sauce.
A few Mixed Pickles.
Some cooked Chicken or Partridge Fillets.
A handful of Cooked Green Peas.
Twelve turned Olives.
This is an ingredients list for a moulded aspic salad rather than a step-by-step method, which was normal in professional manuals of the period: the cook was assumed to know how to line and fill a mould. The hinge is temperature control of the aspic — it must be syrupy but still liquid when it goes into a chilled mould, or the layers will either slide or set cloudy.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz (about 2.5 US cups) and a quart 40 fl oz (5 cups). A gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or a generous half cup of mayonnaise.
- Jardinière of vegetablesNot a single vegetable but a mixture cut to uniform batons or dice — carrot, turnip, French beans, sometimes cauliflower sprigs — each cooked separately until just tender and cooled. Uniformity of cut is the whole point; it is what the finished slice looks like.
- Aspic jellyA quart seems generous, but in a moulded salad of this kind much of it goes on lining and coating rather than filling. Set a thin layer in a chilled mould first, decorate on that set layer, then build up. Modern gelatine sheets or powder are standardised and can set harder than a period calf's-foot or veal-bone stock, so it is worth a lighter hand if you do not want a rubbery jelly.
- Anchovies and salmonAnchovies of the period were salt-packed and needed soaking and filleting; oil-packed fillets today are already mild and can go straight in. Smoked salmon then was drier and saltier than most cold-smoked sides sold now — taste the whole assembly before adding any salt.
- Turned olivesTo turn an olive is to cut the flesh away from the stone in a single spiral strip with a small knife, so it holds its shape as a hollow barrel. Pitted olives are the practical substitute; they simply look less deliberate on the cut surface.
- Picked prawns and caviare"Picked" means shelled and cleaned. Add the caviare last and fold it in barely at all — stirring it through mayonnaise bursts the eggs and greys the whole mixture.
- Assembly and unmouldingBind the vegetables, peas, pickles, chicken or game fillets and shellfish with the mayonnaise, pack into the lined mould without air pockets, seal with more aspic and chill several hours until firm. Dip the mould in warm water for a few seconds only before turning out.
- YieldThe quantities suggest a mould large enough for something like eight to ten as a first course, or fewer as a cold luncheon dish, though the original gives no yield. Best assembled the day it is eaten: mayonnaise-bound fillings tend to weep once they have stood.
Salade à la Russe entered French professional cookery in the second half of the nineteenth century and by the 1890s was a fixture on cold buffets in London hotels and country houses. Its ancestry is usually traced to the elaborate composed salads served in Russian restaurants of the period — the Moscow dish generally credited to the chef Lucien Olivier is the most-cited example — where diced vegetables bound with a rich mayonnaise were dressed up with crayfish, game, caviare and aspic. What travelled westward was the idea rather than any fixed formula, and cooks treated the name as a licence to use whatever cold luxuries the larder held, which is why this version reads as an inventory. The heavy use of aspic is characteristic of high-class cookery before domestic refrigeration: a jellied mould kept its shape and its garnish on a sideboard through a long meal, and the mirror-bright coating was itself a display of the kitchen's skill in clarifying stock. The reduction of the dish to diced carrot and peas in bottled mayonnaise, familiar from twentieth-century delicatessen counters, came much later.