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Salads: Russian
Moscow Salad (Russian recipe). 1 cupful cold red beets, 1 cupful cold potatoes 2 onions, 1 cupful celery, 1 head chicory, 1 teaspoonful capers, 1 teaspoonful pickled nasturtium seeds, 6 olives.
Cut the beets and potatoes into fine cubes, slice the onions fine, cut the celery into inch-length pieces, tear the chicory into fine strips, cut the olives into thin slices. Toss lightly together, add the capers and nasturtium seeds. Lay in lettuce leaves. Serve with French dressing or mayonnaise. Garnish with rings of hardboiled eggs and sprinkle over the top a tablespoonful yolk of egg put through a potato ricer.-HELEN SAS- MORSKY.
Aspic Salad (Russian recipe). 1 cupful green peas, ½ cupful cold carrots, 1 tablespoonful capers, 1 cupful aspic jelly.
Cut the carrots into tiny cuber Ornament the bottom of a mold with the peas, carrot, and capers, and fix them with aspic jelly. When hard, fill the mold with jelly. Let it grow solid, then scoop out a small hollow with a hot spoon and fill with mayonnaise.
Red-Vegetable Salad (Russian recipe). 2 cupfuls cold beets, 2 cupfuls cold boiled potatoes, 2 cupfuls raw red cabbage, teaspoonful salt, 6 tablespoonfuls oil.
Chop the beets and potatoes fine.
Pour over them the red vinegar in which the beets have been pickled.
Add the cabbage shredded very fine.
Sprinkle with salt and oil. Toss together, and stand in the refrigerator half an hour before serving. Just before serving, add cupful French dressing flavored with onion juice.
Cauliflower-and-Potato Salad. cupfuls cold potatoes, + cupful cold cauliflower.
Cut the potato into fine cubes and mince the cauliflower coarsely. Toss SALADS lightly, and serve with a French dressing. Garnish with slices of cucumber.
Summer Salad. 6 tomatoes, 3 cucumbers, 1 onion, 3 green peppers, 2 apples.
Slice the tomatoes, cucumbers, and apples; chop the onion and peppers fine. Blend with a French dressing. -MAY IRWIN.
Baked-Bean Salad. 2 cupfuls cold baked beans, 3 ripe tomatoes, 3 tablespoonfuls vinegar, 6 tablespoonfuls oil, 1 teaspoonful mustard, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, teaspoonful onion juice.
Make a dressing from the vinegar, oil, and seasonings. Heap the beans on lettuce, garnish with sliced tomatoes and over all pour the dressing. Tomato Salad (German recipe).
Peel medium-sized tomatoes, remove a thin slice from the top of each, take out the seeds and some of the pulp, sprinkle inside with salt, invert, and let stand thirty minutes. Shred head small cabbage. Let stand two hours in 1 quart cold water to which 2 tablespoonfuls salt have been added. Cook slowly for thirty minutes½ cupful each cold water and vinegar, a bit bay leaf, teaspoonful peppercorns, ½ teaspoonful mustard seed, and 6 cloves. Strain, and pour over the cabbage drained from salt water. Let stand for two hours, again drain, and refill the tomatoes.
Tomato-Pineapple Salad.
Peel medium-sized tomatoes, remove a thin slice from the top of each, take out the seeds and some of the pulp. Sprinkle inside with salt, invert, and let stand thirty minutes.
Fill the tomatoes with fresh pineapple cut in small cubes and English walnut meats, using pineapple and nut meats, mixed with mayonnaise.
Garnish with mayonnaise halves of nut meats and slices cut from the tops of tomatoes. Serve on a bed of lettuce leaves.
Shaddock Salad. 2 green peppers, 1 head romaine, Pulp 1 large grape fruit, 3 tomatoes.
Cook the peppers in boiling water; cool, and shred. Shred the romaine; remove the pulp from the grape fruit; peel the tomatoes and cut in quarters lengthwise. Arrange in a salad bowl, and pour over French dressing.
A block of cold-vegetable salads from the same chapter, the first three built on the Russian habit of dicing cooked roots small and binding them with dressing. Several quantities in the text have lost their fractions, so read the proportions as guides rather than gospel.
- Missing amountsIn the Red-Vegetable Salad the salt and the French dressing have no figures attached; a teaspoon of salt and about half a cup of dressing suit those quantities of vegetable. The Cauliflower-and-Potato Salad and the German Tomato Salad are likewise short their numbers for potato, cauliflower and cabbage. Season and dress by eye and taste.
- Pickled nasturtium seedsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, brined and then pickled in spiced vinegar, were a standard kitchen-garden substitute for capers and were sometimes sold as "poor man's capers." They are not a supermarket item now; double the capers instead, or use pickled green peppercorns.
- ChicoryIn an American book of this date "chicory" usually means curly endive or escarole rather than the pale Belgian witloof chicon. Tear it small, as directed, or the bitterness dominates the beet and potato.
- The riced yolkHard-boiled yolk pushed through a potato ricer and scattered over the top is the garnish later cooks call mimosa. A fine sieve or the small holes of a box grater does the same job. Add it at the table; it turns pasty once it sits in dressing.
- Beet bleedDiced beet will stain everything it touches within minutes. Dress the beets separately and fold them in at the last moment if you want the potato and celery to stay white, or accept the uniform pink such salads often take on.
- Aspic quantitiesOne cup of aspic jelly fills only a small individual mold or two; scale up for a full ring. Set the decorative layer of peas, carrot and caper in a thin film of nearly cold jelly first, let it firm in the refrigerator, then add the rest, or the garnish floats.
- The hot spoonDipping a spoon in boiling water and wiping it dry before scooping the hollow is the whole trick to a clean cavity in set jelly. Fill with mayonnaise only just before serving.
- ShaddockShaddock is the pomelo, ancestor of the grapefruit, though the recipe itself calls for grapefruit pulp. Remove the segments free of all membrane; the bitter pith is what ruins this salad.
- YieldsThe Moscow Salad as written serves four to six as a first course; the Red-Vegetable Salad, with six cups of vegetable, serves six to eight. The half-hour chill it specifies is a minimum, not a maximum.
The Moscow Salad here is a plain relative of the dish Russians call Olivier and the French salade russe: cooked root vegetables cut in small even dice, sharpened with capers and pickles and bound with mayonnaise. Its ancestry is generally traced to the kitchens of mid-nineteenth-century Moscow restaurants, and by the time this book appeared the formula had spread across Europe and America in progressively simpler forms, the game and crayfish of the restaurant version giving way to beet, potato and celery. The chapter's habit of labelling recipes "Russian" or "German" and attributing others to named contributors, including the stage comedienne May Irwin, reflects a period fashion in American household books for foreign-sounding salads served on a lettuce leaf with French dressing or mayonnaise; the aspic salad belongs to the same moment, when reliable packaged gelatin had made molded work more practical in an ordinary kitchen.