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Jardinière Salad
1 cupful strips new turnip Chicken stock 1 cupful strips new carrots 4 tablespoonfuls olive oil 1 cupful strips potatoes 1 cupful green peas 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 2 tablespoonfuls white wine vinegar Mayonnaise dressing Put the turnips, carrots, potatoes, and peas into a casserole with the butter. Cover them with the chicken stock, and cook until they are quite tender; then drain.
Mix the oil and vinegar and stir them into the vegetables. Set away in a cool place for one hour. Divide into small earthenware dishes and cover with the mayonnaise dressing.
A classic French vegetable salad, dressed twice: once hot with oil and vinegar so the flavour soaks in, and again cold with mayonnaise. The technique is sound; only the vessel and the cooking method need translating.
- "Casserole" means the potHere a casserole appears to be a lidded pot in which the vegetables are simmered in stock, distinct from the small earthenware dishes used for serving. A heavy saucepan or small Dutch oven does the job.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyTurnip, carrot, potato and peas will not reach tenderness at the same moment, and cooked as one pot the peas collapse before the turnip yields. Simmer each in the buttered stock in turn, lifting them out as they are done, then reduce what remains of the stock and reserve it for soup.
- Cut for the nameThe jardinière cut is usually given as batons of even size, roughly 1/8 to 1/4 inch square and 1 1/2 inches long, though sources differ. The recipe's "strips" points the same way, and uniformity makes the cooking times more predictable.
- Dress while warmThe four tablespoons of oil and two of vinegar go onto the vegetables as soon as they are drained and still hot. Warm vegetables absorb a vinaigrette; cold ones simply wear it.
- Drain thoroughlyAny stock left clinging will thin the mayonnaise into a puddle at the bottom of the dish. Spread the drained vegetables on a towel or a rack for a few minutes before dressing.
- The hour in a cool placeThis was a larder instruction, meaning cool rather than cold. An hour in the refrigerator works, but bring the salad back toward room temperature before saucing so the mayonnaise coats rather than seizes.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggHomemade mayonnaise here is uncooked. If serving to anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise loosened with a spoonful of the vinaigrette.
- YieldFour cupfuls of prepared vegetables divide into six small dishes as a first course, or four as a side salad.
Anything called à la jardinière announces a mixture of fresh young vegetables cut to a uniform shape, a convention codified in nineteenth-century French professional kitchens and carried into English and American cookery books wholesale. The insistence on new turnips and new carrots is not decoration: before year-round shipping, the difference between spring roots and the woody storage crop of late winter governed whether a dish like this was worth making at all.