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Egyptian Salad (Wash the crisp parts of three)
Wash the crisp parts of three heads of endive. Dry on a soft towel and arrange neatly on a flat dish. Sprinkle it with three tablespoonfuls of olive oil, then a tablespoonful of chopped onion. Mix together one tablespoonful of honey (if you have it), if not, one tablespoonful of sugar and one of vinegar. Add a half teaspoonful of salt and a dash of white pepper. Pour over the endive and serve.
A one-bowl salad that hinges entirely on the greens being bone-dry and the dressing being poured at the last moment. Two details in the wording need translating before you shop.
- Which endiveIn American books of this period "endive" usually means curly endive or escarole — the sprawling, frizzy chicory sold as frisée or escarole today — not the pale forced Belgian chicons. "The crisp parts of three heads" means the blanched inner leaves; the tough dark outer ones go to the stockpot or the compost.
- Dry it properlyThe oil has to cling to the leaves, and it will not adhere to a wet surface. A soft towel works, though a salad spinner followed by ten minutes uncovered in the refrigerator does it better.
- The order is deliberateThe order is oil first, then onion, then the sweet-sour mixture. Coating the leaves in fat before the vinegar reaches them is a common way to keep the acid from wilting and darkening cut edges, though the recipe does not say whether the sequence was chosen for that reason.
- Dressing ratioThree tablespoons oil to one of vinegar is a 3:1 vinaigrette, standard and reliable. The honey or sugar is there to offset chicory's bitterness rather than to sweeten the salad, so taste before adding more.
- Honey "if you have it"Honey was a seasonal and often local commodity when this was written, while granulated sugar was cheap and widely available. Honey gives a rounder result; warming it slightly helps it blend into the vinegar instead of sinking.
- Chopped onionA tablespoon of raw onion is assertive against endive. Use a mild sweet onion or shallot, chop it fine, and if it is sharp, rinse it in cold water and pat dry.
- White pepperProbably specified for appearance — no dark flecks on the pale leaves. Black pepper will serve if that is what you have, though the two are not identical in flavour.
- Yield and timingThree heads of curly endive make roughly four to six side servings. Dress it at the table; the leaves begin to slump soon after the dressing goes on.
Nineteenth-century salad chapters were fond of national labels — Italian, Russian, Egyptian — attached less to documented dishes than to a general sense of the exotic, and "Egyptian Salad" is best read that way. There is a thread of sense behind it: chicory and endive have long been cultivated around the eastern Mediterranean and the Nile, appearing in Egyptian and Greek writing as both food and medicine, and honey-with-vinegar preparations are genuinely ancient — oxymel, a Greek term later taken up by Roman writers, described such a mixture, though chiefly as a medicine rather than a salad dressing. What the recipe more plausibly documents is a turn in American eating around the turn of the twentieth century, when raw green salads moved from suspect novelty toward an expected course, and cookbooks began teaching readers the mechanics of a vinaigrette — measured oil, measured acid, a little sweetening, salt and pepper — alongside the older boiled and cream dressings poured over cooked vegetables.