Salad
*-Sydney Smith wrote a neat little poem to describe how salad should be prepared, and he promised that if his directions were followed- Then, though green turtle fail, though venison's tough, And ham and turkey are not boiled enough, Serenely full, the epicure may say, Fate cannot harm me-I have dined to-day.
There spoke the perfect epicure; and the speech goes to * The substance of this article has already appeared in print. Salad prove that the supremacy of enjoyment is based on simplicity of taste. There may be epicures who like to titillate their jaded appetites and acquired tastes with unheard-of luxuries and far-fetched combinations; but the world has long since recognised that all the best and healthiest pleasures keep well within bounds, and must never lose sight of moderation. Every art has its monstrosities; gastronomy has not been behindhand; and though he must be a bold man who will venture to blaspheme the elegancies of French cookery, there comes a time to every Englishman who may have wandered into a mistaken admiration of sophisticated messes, when he longs for the simple diet of his native land, and vows that the best cookery in the world, and that which satisfies the most refined epicureanism, sets up for its ideal-plainness of good food, and the cultivation of natural tastes. Now a salad is sin plicity itself, and here is a marvel-it is the crowning grace of a French dinner, while, on the other hand, it is little understood and villanously treated at English tables. To that system of cookery which prides itself on its art it gives the charm of nature, and in the midst of the triumphs of gastronomy it raises a fine protest in favour of simplicity. In our own system of cookery, which boasts of its naturalness, and which therefore ought to hold the salad in highest honour, it occupies but an inferior place, and is nearly always spoilt. In respect of salads, therefore, the French and Italians have beaten us in our own line. We swear by plain cookery; we turn up our noses at elaborate sauces; we profess to eschew messes, and to care only for simples; and yet we have no idea, like the French and Italians, how to turn to splendid account a dinner of her os. There is a proverb which identifies such a dinner with meanness of fare; but it is not mean. It is quite certain that the majority of epicures agree with Sydney Smith that a really good salad will glorify any dinner, and make up for the lack of turtle and venison and the rarest dainties.
Salad The fact is that a salad is more than food, and we are attracted to it by more than hunger. I am not enough of a chemist to go into details; but here are two facts which explain a good deal. One is that the most important herb used in salads, the lettuce, abounds in a juice which has not only the effect of opium, but where opium would be hurtful takes the place of it in pharmacy. The other is that the plant of next importance for salads, the endive or chicory, is largely used in its root as a substitute for coffee. These and like facts point to the conclusion that salads have an attraction for us over and above that of palatable foodan attraction which has its parallel in a man's craving for the tobacco-leaf, in a woman's craving for the tea-leaf, and in the passion which drives a Chinese to the poppyhead. In other words, a salad is not merely food, but has also an action on the nervous system, stimulating or sedative, which is immensely agreeable and acts like a spell. Whatever be the nature of the charm it is a powerful one, and renders the salad a sort of prince incognito among the assemblage of dishes. It has an undefinable rank on the table, which makes it more important than it seems.
Without it, in the eyes of the epicure, the finest dinner has failed of its supreme relish; and to a very commonplace dinner it gives an ethereal grace. Any one who dips into the works of the old herbalists will be astonished to see how they insist upon the virtues of the salad plants. Many of these virtues are no doubt imaginary, but some are real enough. Thus the herbalists praised endive as a cure for the gout. We have forgotten all about this, and are content to find the refreshment of coffee in the root, the refreshment of a salad in the leaves. Here and there the old theory survives. I remember hearing a physician say to a patient who was much too apt at bluepill, "That is ruin. I will tell you what to do. Eat a parboiled cauliflower three times a week by way of salad, and be sure you eat the bitter stalks as well as the flower. 4 Salad It is the best medicine in the world." As for lettuce, it is recommended by Galen as a soporific, and the prepared juice, lactucarium, is to be found in every chemist's shop. The old herbalists, however, had another theory. They said that the lettuce was not only soothing like opium, but had the supreme virtue of enabling us to forget womankind. It was the salad of all others for monks and nuns to eat, for it has a hallowing influence that makes one oblivious of love and all its fever. Lest the romantic lover should on this account refuse lettuce, let me remind him that tobacco -which is not indeed a salad, but belongs to the order of nightshades, that has yielded several salad-plants, such as the potato and the tomato-was supposed to have a like effect; and there is a vulgar opinion that Sir Isaac Newton never married because he smoked too much. According to the same old theory, there is no love-potion so efficacious as an onion. Would you win a woman's love-give her onions to eat, whatever the consequences. The French, too, have a proverb, that if a wife only knew what a loving charm there is in celery, she would send to Rome for it every day to provide a salad for her husband. If one must, however, have a love-charm, there is the tomato, the old English name of which is love-apple. This reminds me of an odd omission in the story of the loves of Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Bardell. Dickens nowhere explains how it came to pass that when his hero ordered tomatosauce with his mutton-chops, the sensitive soul of Mrs. Bardell took this for a proposal of marriage and the voice of love. There is not a hint even in the speech of Serjeant Buzfuz that the tomato is the love-apple, and that the sauce which Mr. Pickwick ordered was love-apple sauce. There is, no doubt, a great deal of fancy in all this. We expect certain effects, and they are produced by the association of ideas. But there is this always to go upon that most of the salad-plants have an exhilarating effect, a distinct action upon the nervous system, and through the nerves upon the Salad spiritual part of us, till at last people exalt the preparation of a salad into a religion, and become fanatical about its rites and ceremonies.
If Sydney Smith be right, and if the enjoyment of a salad be the height of epicureanism, one would imagine that so simple a taste might be easily gratified. It is a delicacy which the poorest of us ought always to command. No cooking is required. Give us a salad-bowl; give us a few raw herbs, and some common condiments, and there is a pleasant repast assured, even if there is nothing to add to it but cold meat. And yet in this England of ours it is difficult to get a good salad-in an English eating-house almost impossible. We have lots of vegetables, with every variety of lettuce and of endive. But in the first place it is a tradition of the English kitchen that salads must be washed and kept in water until ready for use; the consequence is that they lose much of their flavour; they become more watery than they are by nature; and after the salad is devoured one can often see a little pool of water at the bottom of the salad-bowl which the green leaves have not been able to absorb. The tradition of the French kitchen is that no salad must be washed or see the water except the corn salad, which is sometimes called lamb's lettuce. But it may be said that a salad requires to be cleaned, and hence the need of water. Of course it requires cleaning; but the French method is to pick the leaves and to clean every separate one with a dry napkin. This is the reason of the difference between the French mode of serving a salad and ours. In an English house one often sees a lettuce sent up to table whole; it has been washed whole, and it can be served whole. And when English people see a French salad served, the leaves all severed and sometimes cut, they fancy that this is a mere matter of convenience, the cook saving us trouble. It is not so, but a necessary result of the French process of cleaning the salad.
It is not enough, however, to get the herbs in perfection; Salad there comes next a great question about the appropriate mixture to go with them. There are numbers of English who think that no mixture is necessary, and who limit their fancy to the cos-lettuce, which they pluck leaf by leaf, and eat with a little salt. It is no wonder that they fail to appreciate the salad, and rob it of the importance which it ought to attain at a well-appointed table, when they do not know, or do not care for, the art of educing its finer qualities, and making of the simplest dish in the world a feast worthy of Olympus. Some people take to eating a salad in this crude way because of a vague theory that it is good for the blood; and others avoid it because of some theory that so much " green meat" cannot agree with them, The one set never acquire the true gusto for salad, and the other have a continual suspicion of it. Now these are the only two classes for which the English eating-house keeper thinks it worth his while to cater. It is a matter of hard fact that a salad-bowl is a thing unknown in 999 out of 1000 eating-houses in England. In private houses and in clubs of course it is to be found, because English gentlemen of the class who belong to clubs know that a salad to be enjoyed must be mixed, and that it cannot be properly mixed without a good-sized bowl. But let us go into one of Spiers and Pond's establishments and in singling them out I pay them a compliment. They are at the head of their profession, they have deserved well of the public, and if they fail in any point we may be sure that the failure belongs not to them individually, but to the English system. I have not been to all their establishments, but in those I have visted this is what I find. They keep an immense bowl on the buffet, crammed with a confusion of salad-herbs soaking in water. You ask for a salad. The waiter brings you a wet lettuce cut in halves upon a flat plate, and he puts down beside it an annulated bottle, full of the abominable compound known as salad-mixture. You politely hint to the waiter, first of all, that you prefer Salad not to touch his prepared mixture. He takes it away, wounded in his feelings, and assumes that you are going to eat the lettuce with salt. You next make a demand for oil and vinegar, and try to explain that a salad to be properly mixed must, according to the saying, be mixed by a madman; it cannot, therefore, be mixed on a flat plate. The waiter then brings a soup-plate; if you are not satisfied with that he brings a vegetable-dish, then perhaps a slopbasin; and if you are still discontented, he tries you las of all with a soup-tureen. As for a salad-bowl-which one can get at once in the paltriest French restaurant it is not, as a rule, to be found in the splendidly furnished establishments of Spiers and Pond. This simply means that a salad properly prepared does not belong to the English system of the table, and does not enter into the calculations of those who cater for it in public. I sometimes at English inns manage to get a salad-bowl by asking for a punch-bowl. Mine host is nearly always prepared to make punch, though he does not know what a salad is. When the Englishman, still more the Englishwoman, determines that a salad is not to be eaten with salt alone, but must be bathed in some mixture, one discovers a curious weakness in the national taste, -a chariness of oil, and love of vinegar. An odd proof of this is to be found in the scientific nomenclature of the gardeners. Like all sciolists, they are fond of inventing new names. They are not content to call salad-plants, as of old, salad-plants, that is, plants to be eaten with salt; they have invented the name of acetarious plants, that is, plants to be eaten with vinegar. There is the true English idea-a salad is the infancy of mixed pickles. We have a besotted love of pickles in England, and never seem to understand that vinegar in a salad must be doled out with a niggardly hand. As for oil, little of it is used, and that little is often overwhelmed with cream, with yolk of egg, with mustard, with sugar, a succession of incongruous expedients to Salad conceal the oil or to take the place of it. All this messing is death to the salad and to the true taste of the green herb. About salad-oil two points are worthy of notice, though it is necessary to insist only on one. The first is, that it is the most simple and digestible form in which oleaginous matter can be presented to the stomach, and that it has a medical value in its combination with raw herbs. English people would not be so timid of what they call "green meat" if they could bring themselves to swallow it saturated with oil. But here is the chief point: the oil is not only good and wholesome in itself, but it catches up and preserves in a remarkable manner the subtle flavour of the salad. There are certain oils and fatty substances which have a peculiar affinity for odours; and it is well known that those chemists who make it their business to prepare scents from rose-leaves, jasmine, lavender, and other flowers, make use of these oils and fats for storing up the perfumes, with which they become quickly impregnated. One can see what oil as a custodian of flavour in rivalry with vinegar is if one can remember the taste of a sardine. See how delicate the flavour is preserved in oil, and imagine how it would be lost in brine -or English pickle. It is the glory of the Lucca oil that it acts in this way upon the salad, bringing out and preserving its delicacy of flavour; which, on the other hand, is dissipated in water, and overpowered in a mess of cream and egg, syrup and mustard. Be a counsellor with the salt, is the old saying; be a miser with the winegar; but be a spendthrift with the oil. And we English would be happier with our salads if we could learn to put up with the beautiful oil of Lucca and to forego the astonishing combinations (sometimes including anchovy sauce and mushroom ketchup) with which we disguise our green herbs, till, in opposition to the accepted principles of English cookery, they are irrecognisable. The best salad mixtures will be found described in the preceding Salad pages, under the names of Cruet Sauce, Mayonnaise, and Remoulade.
As for the herbs to be used in salad, we are in England rather limited in our tastes. Of the infinite variety of salads which can be made from wild plants-the salad burnet, the ladies" smock, the stonecrop, the sea bindweed, the sweet Cicely, the buckshorn plantain, and the ox-eyed daisy-our people know next to nothing, and they allow quantities of excellent food to be wasted on the cattle. The dandelion, which is a favourite salad in France, and a herb renowned for its virtues, we should be half ashamed to see on our tables. Nothing will do for us in England but the most highly-cultivated kinds. First of all, there is the lettuce, which is of two sorts-the cabbage-lettuce, known in France as the laitue pommée, and the cos-lettuce, which the French term the laitue romaine. Of these-and there are endless varieties of either we seem in England to prefer the latter, with its long leaves, because it can be eaten by itself; while the French probably care more for the former. Then comes the endive in three classes : first, the broad-leaved or Batavian endive, which the French call escarole-a prime favourite; next, the curly-leaved endive, which the French call sometimes chicorée and sometimes laitue frisée; lastly, the wild endive or succory (succory being but the old English word for chicory), which is called by the French barbe de capucin, and whose roots are supposed to make a very fair imitation of coffee. Perhaps next in order of rank deserves to be mentioned celery; but we only use the bare stalk, whereas the French will put the whole plant into the salad-bowl, from the root at one end to the leafage at the other. Even better than the celery is the celeriac, that is, a celery with turnip-like root, which is the celeri-rave of the French and the knottsellerie of the Germans. The latter are especially fond of it, and go into ecstasies with moist eyes and flowing mouth when they talk of it. In England, although it may be Salad cultivated with greater ease and at less expense than the common celery, it is not only slighted, but few persons know where they can lay their hands upon it. Let it here therefore be recorded that the celeriac roots come over to this country from Germany in the end of October, and are to be had in any quantity at a house which abounds in foreign dainties of all sorts-Lingner's Delicatessen Handlung, 46, Old Compton Street, Soho, with its branch at 30, Fenchurch Street, City. Another salad which is too much neglected in England is that of tomatos. The wonder is how any one who knows what a superb thing is a salad of raw tomatos can care to desecrate this glorious apple by cooking it. I should weary the reader if I went on to sound the praises of the mustard and cress salad, the corn salad, the beetroot salad, the potato salad, and the salade de légumes. One word, however, about the last two. Most persons are acquainted with Sydney Smith's receipt for a potato salad- Two large potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve, Unwonted softness to the salad give; Of mordant mustard, add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment which bites too soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt; Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, And once with vinegar, procured from town; True flavour needs it, and your poet begs The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, scarce suspected, animate the whole; And lastly, in the flavoured compound toss A magic teaspoon of anchovy sauce :
Then, though green turtle fail, though venison's tough, And ham and turkey are not boiled enough, Serenely full, the epicure may say, Fate cannot harm me-I have dined to-day.
This appears to have been the receipt which he finally Salad sanctioned; but in his memoirs there is a different edition, which contains four lines that ought not to be forgotten- Oh, green and glorious! oh, herbaceous treat ! 'Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat; Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul, And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
It should be noted, however, that the receipt furnished by the witty canon is not for a salad, but for a salad dressing, -it is for a mixture which is to give "unwonted softness to the salad." A true potato salad is not passed through a sieve; it is made of cold boiled kidney potatoes-what the French call Vitelotte-cut in slices. Of all the cooked salads, however, that which the French call the salade de légumes will always have the pre-eminence. It is exceedingly difficult to get in England-even at a Pall Mall club one has to order it the day beforehand; yet at the paltriest French restaurant in London or in Paris it can be had at a few minutes' notice. It is nothing but a cold Macedon, and the best English name for it would be a salad of Macedon.
It is not enough to provide the salad and the salad dressing: there is one thing more to be attended to-what the French call fourniture, what we may call garnish or garniture. This is a sprinkling of chopped herbs which, when cunningly selected and applied, give a gaiety and sparkle to the composition of the salad. For a salad of lettuce, be it round or long, the usual garniture is a ravigote, that is, chopped tarragon, chervil, burnet, and chives. When the curly endive comes in, and we ask for a salad of it in any French restaurant, the waiter, if he knows his business, will at once ask, "Avec ou sans?" which means, Will you have it with or without a chapon? -that is, a crust of bread on which a clove of garlic has been rubbed. This crust of bread is mixed with the endive salad, gives it its bouquet, and forms its garniture. What Salad shall be the garniture of any salad depends much on place and season. There are two sets of herbs used-one of the aromatic sort, such as tarragon, burnet, chervil, sometimes even parsley; the other, the onion tribe, from garlic, which we in England abhor, down to the more delicate varieties, spring onions, shalots and chives. There are some persons who set their faces against the most bashful and refined of onions-even against chives. What is the use of saying, as some fanatics about salad do, that to them a salad is impossible? The garniture must be taken as we like it or as we find it. Early in the year, when the cabbage-lettuce comes in, there is no tarragon or chervil, and we must be content with spring onions and shalots; if these are objectionable we fall back on tarragon vinegar to mix with the oil. When the cos-lettuce appears, we have tarragon and vinegar in perfection, and with it the most innocent of the onion race -chives. When the curly endive comes in, the French, as above said, forego tarragon, sometimes retain the chervil, but revel in the odour of garlic. In a week or two, when the Batavian endive-the escarole-is ready, they will return to the garniture used for the cos-lettuce. It is necessary to conclude, and I conclude with a lament. There are salads in abundance, and with a little trouble we can have them in perfection. But all modern salads want the finishing touch which made them most exquisite in days of old. Our modern manners forbid that touch, for it was found to be not always convenient. In bygone times the fairest and the youngest lady at the table was expected to mix the salad with her fingers. This was enchanting when the lady was in the heyday of beauty and there were men who would be too pleased to drink champagne out of her slipper. The fashion, however, had its inconveniences; it has passed away, and it survives only in the phrase, Retourner la salade avec les doigts, which is a way the French have of describing a lady to be still young and beautiful.
Sally Lunn SALLY LUNN is an honoured name from the Land's End to John o' Groat's. But why should the reader be called upon to meditate upon her virtues in these pages, in which so little has been said about the Bath bun, the Banbury cake, the Scotch shortbread, the Brioche, the Baba, the Savarin, the Gauffre, and many another noble thing?
The reason is that her name has been mixed up with a little culinary scandal; and it is necessary to vindicate her fair fame. The greatest cook of modern times, Carême, came over to England to minister to the palate of the Prince Regent. He did not stay long, but he stayed long enough to appreciate the charms of Sally Lunn and her ever memorable cake. He was a great cook, but a fearful coxcomb-an immeasurable egotist. If ever he made the slightest change in a dish, he vaunted the variation as an original idea, and thenceforward set up as the sovereign creator of the dainty. So it was that he dressed up Sally Lunn a little, and presented her to the Parisian world as his own-his Solilemne. The fact might well be forgotten, but there are stupid asses who will not let us forget it. They come over to England; they send up, among the sweets of a dinner, Sally and her teacake, rigged out in the height of French fashion; and like an English dancer or singer who insists on Mademoiselle to her name, the good honest Sally that we know is announced as the incomparable Solilemne.