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Cardinal Salad
Wash and dry two heads of lettuce and a bunch of water-cress; cut two boiled red beets into thin slices; cut a half-dozen small red radishes into slices; chop six hardboiled eggs rather fine. Arrange the lettuce leaves nicely in a salad bowl; mix the cress, radishes, beets, eggs and one sliced cucumber together, and mix with the whole a half-pint of cardinal Mayonnaise, which is made by adding beet juice to plain Mayonnaise. Put in the salad bowl on the lettuce leaves, and serve at once.
A composed salad that depends entirely on colour, so the order of work matters more than the quantities. Dress and toss at the last possible moment.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseThat is one cup (about 240 ml). Beet juice thins it, so start with a stiff mayonnaise and add the juice a teaspoon at a time until it is rose-coloured but still clings to a spoon.
- The beet juiceUse the liquid from the boiled beets, cooled, or squeeze a slice of cooked beet in a cloth. Canned beet liquid works but is often salty and sweet; taste the dressing before adding any further salt.
- Homemade mayonnaise and raw yolksPeriod mayonnaise is raw egg yolk and oil, and it is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised or very young, or start from a good jarred mayonnaise and colour that instead.
- Keep the beets separate until the endBeets bleed. Slice them last, dress them in a little of the cardinal mayonnaise on their own, and fold everything together just before it goes to the table, or the whole bowl turns uniformly pink.
- Water-cressSold as watercress; pick off the thick stems and use only the leafy tips. Arugula or upland cress substitutes acceptably for the peppery note.
- The eggsSix hard-boiled eggs chopped fine is a great deal of egg for two heads of lettuce. Four is closer to modern taste, and reserving some sieved yolk to scatter over the top gives a better-looking bowl.
- CucumberPeel and seed a standard cucumber, or use an English cucumber unpeeled, and salt the slices for ten minutes and pat dry so they do not water down the dressing.
- YieldServes roughly six to eight as a side salad. It does not keep well; dressed leftovers discolour and weep.
"Cardinal" in nineteenth-century cookery is generally a colour word rather than a place or a person: it marks anything dyed the deep red of a cardinal's robes, whether by beet juice, lobster coral or a red fruit puree. The same convention gives us cardinal sauce for fish, and the later dessert of cardinal pears, in which the red comes from a fruit puree. This salad belongs to the era when a dinner table was expected to offer visual contrast as much as flavour, and when mayonnaise-bound composed salads, arranged on a bed of leaves rather than tossed, were common in American company cookery. Beets were cheap and stored through the winter, which made beet juice a convenient kitchen source of a strong red.