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Italian Salad
Cut one carrot or one turnip into slices and then into diamonds, squares, or fancy shapes with a vegetable cutter. Throw them in boiling stock and cook until tender. Have ready two cold boiled potatoes, and if convenient, one beet. Cut in the same way. Then mix all the vegetables carefully in a basin, sprinkle over a tablespoonful of chopped onion or leek, cover with French dressing and serve garnished with water-cress.
In Italy, this is served in a sort of bread crust, called Crôustade.
A composed cooked-vegetable salad in the French style, more assembly than cookery. The only real technique is keeping the beet from staining everything else.
- Beets last, alwaysCut and dress the beet separately and fold it in at the last moment, or the potatoes and turnip turn uniformly pink. This is the hinge of the dish.
- Boiling stock, not waterThe carrot or turnip goes into stock rather than water. The recipe says only to cook until tender; for small diamonds that is a matter of a few minutes, and they are better stopped while they still hold their edges than boiled to collapse.
- Vegetable cutterA period aspic or truffle cutter. A small knife cutting even 1/4-inch dice, or a channel knife and then a slice, gives the same effect.
- French dressingIn books of this era this means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked to a temporary emulsion. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Onion or leekA tablespoon of raw chopped onion is assertive against bland potato; if you want it milder, use the white of a leek, or rinse the chopped onion in cold water and pat dry.
- Dress while warmThe recipe calls for cold boiled potatoes, but potatoes and root vegetables take up dressing more readily while still warm; if you dress them warm, keep the beet separate and check the salt and vinegar again after chilling.
- The croustadeA hollowed-out bread case, brushed with butter or fried and dried in the oven at 350F until crisp. Fill only at the table, or the dressing softens it.
- YieldAs written this serves two or three as a side. Multiply straightforwardly for more.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks used "Italian salad" loosely for almost any mixture of cooked, diced vegetables bound with dressing — the same family that produced salade russe, macédoine and eventually the mayonnaise-heavy insalata russa still sold in Italian delicatessens. The fancy cutting is often taken to be a legacy of professional garde-manger work, where root vegetables were shaped with aspic cutters so a cold platter would look deliberate rather than leftover, though that derivation is inference rather than established fact. That such neatness appears in a printed recipe at all says something about the period's ambitions: vegetables were being promoted as worth arranging, not merely boiling. The croustade note is the sort of continental flourish these books liked to attach, though hollowed bread cases were standard in English and American cookery too, a practical way of serving something moist without a plate.