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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."