Home › The Doctor's Kitchen › Salads (Evelyn has admonished Let your)
Salads (Evelyn has admonished Let your)
Evelyn has admonished: "Let your herby ingredients be exquisitely cull'd, and cleans'd. of all worm-eaten, slimy, cankered, dry, spotted, or anyways vitiated leaves." He enumerates thirty-five different Salad herbs. "Guava Salad," or Angels' food," is a favourite Cape dish. 'Take one and a half dozen guavas, two oranges, sufficient sugar, and a wineglassful of good sherry; peel, and slice the guavas thinly, lay them on a glass dish, and sprinkle over them a little sugar, then a layer of orange, sprinkled with sugar; again guavas, and again orange, continuing thus till the glass is filled; pour over all the glass of sherry, and let it stand for a while. This makes a delicious dish for dessert. The guava resembles a small apple with many seeds, and is famous for the well-known guava jelly; it is imported from the West Indies, and is occasionally grown in British conservatories. The fruit is somewhat astringent, being sweet, aromatic, and sometimes acid.
For a plain, wholesome Salad-dressing: "Mix the yolk of a hard-boiled egg (dry) with one teaspoonful of newly-made mustard from the pot, one teaspoonful of brown sugar, and half a teaspoonful of salt; when these are thoroughly blended, add one tablespoonful of vinegar, and then three of milk. Be careful to mix the vinegar thoroughly before adding the milk, or else it may turn to curd. Cream may be added, but the dressing is sufficiently good without it." 66 Oh, cool in the summer is salad, And warm in the winter is love:
And a Poet shall sing you a ballad Delicious thereon, and thereof:
Take Endive: like love it is bitter; Take Beet, for, like love, it is red; Crisp leaf of the Lettuce shall glitter, With Cress from the rivulet's bed; Anchovies, foam-born, like the lady Whose beauty has maddened this bard, And Olives from groves that are shady, And Eggs (just a hint! 'Boil 'em hard ')."
Evelyn, in his Acetaria, has insisted on no less than nine essential requirements for the proper making of a Sallet, and some of these are sufficiently quaint. For instance, "That the knife (according to the super-curious) with which the Salletherbs are cut (especially oranges, limons, etc.) be of silver, and by no means of steel, which all acids are apt to corrode, and retain a metallick relish of." Again, "That the Saladiere (Sallet dish) be of porcelane, or of the Holland Delf-ware, neither too deep, nor shallow, according to the quantity of the Sallet ingredients." "And note, that there ought to be one such a dish in which to beat, and mingle the liquid vehicles; and a second to receive the crude herbs in, upon which they are to be pour'd, and then with a fork, and a spoon kept continually stirr'd till all the furniture be equally moistened. Some, who are husbands of their oil, pour at first the oil alone, as more apt to communicate, and diffuse its slipperiness than when it is mingled, and beaten with the acids, which they pour on last of all; and 'tis incredible how small a quantity of oil (in this quality like the gilding of wyre) is sufficient to imbue a very plentiful assembly of Sallet-herbs." "Care must be taken by the collector of such edule plants that as near as he can they should consist of the Oluscula, and ex foliis pubescentibus, or (as Martial calls them) Prototomi rudes, and very tenderest partsgerms, young buds, and even first rudiments of their several plants; such as we sometimes find in the craws of the Woodculver, Stock-dove, Partridge, Pheasants, and other Upland fowl, where we have a natural Sallet, pick'd, and almost dress'd to our hands." "But now after all let none imagine that whilst we justify our present subject through all the topicks of panegyric, we would, in favour of the Sallet, dress'd with all its pomp, and advantage, turn mankind to grass again; which were ungratefully to neglect the bounty of Heaven, as well as his health, and comfort."
Two workable recipes sit inside this essay: the Cape guava dessert salad and a cooked-yolk dressing. The surrounding material is quotation from John Evelyn and can be read for pleasure rather than followed.
- A wineglassfulIn late Victorian usage this is about 2 fl oz (60 ml), not a modern 6 oz wine pour. Sherry of that quantity over eighteen guavas is a scenting, not a soaking.
- One and a half dozen guavasEighteen guavas is a large quantity by modern shopping standards; six to eight ripe ones will fill a 1.5-litre glass bowl layered with two oranges. Canned guava halves in syrup work if fresh are unobtainable, in which case cut the added sugar right back.
- Handling the fruitRipe guava is fragrant and yields to a thumb; the central seed mass is hard enough to be unpleasant, so halve the fruit and scoop the seedy core before slicing thinly. The astringency Fernie mentions belongs to underripe fruit.
- "Let it stand for a while"Thirty to sixty minutes, covered, in the refrigerator is enough for the sugar to draw juice and the sherry to spread. Longer than a few hours and the guava slices slump.
- Yield and servingAs written the layered dish serves six to eight as a dessert. Serve it cold, in the glass bowl it was built in, with the pooled syrup spooned over.
- "Newly-made mustard from the pot"Mustard powder slaked with cold water shortly before use, in the English manner, not a jarred Dijon or American mustard. Ready-made English mustard from a tube is the closest equivalent.
- The hinge in the dressingAdd the vinegar to the yolk paste and work it in completely before any milk goes near it. Acid poured onto milk curdles it; dispersing the acid through a thick base first makes curdling less likely, though not impossible.
- Dressing yieldIt makes roughly 5 tablespoons, enough for a salad for two or three. Use whole milk; skimmed has too little fat to carry the mustard.
- Evelyn's silver knifeHis objection was real for carbon steel, which does discolour and taint citrus and bitter leaves. Stainless steel settles the matter, and porcelain or glass bowls remain the right choice for anything acidulated.
The quotations come from John Evelyn's Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699), the first book in English devoted to salad; Evelyn's insistence on silver knives and Delft bowls is quoted admiringly by nineteenth-century compilers who no longer expected anyone to follow it. The guava dish is labelled "a favourite Cape dish", pointing to the Cape Colony kitchens whose fruit desserts reached British readers through empire, at a period when guava itself was known in Britain mainly as imported West Indian jelly or a conservatory curiosity. The verse beginning "Oh, cool in the summer is salad" is generally attributed to the Victorian poet Mortimer Collins. That all this appears in a book on meals medicinal reflects the era's view of raw greens as regimen as much as food, and Evelyn's closing line, refusing to "turn mankind to grass again", is the period's usual concession to the meat-eater.