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Delmonico Dressing
Put some chopped chives in the bottom of the bowl with a chopped beet, a teaspoon of salt and a pinch of pepper. Add six tablespoons of oil and stir with a fork until well mixed. Then add slowly the juice of half a lemon and chill the dressing before serving.
A simple oil-and-lemon dressing thickened and coloured by chopped beet. The original assumes a few things a modern cook should pin down before starting.
- The beet is cookedThe beet is probably cooked -- period recipes calling for "a beet" usually assume a boiled or baked one, though this text does not say so. Use one small cooked beet, peeled and chopped fine, about 1/3 cup. Raw beet stays firm and gives up much less colour to the oil.
- Salt to volumeA full teaspoon of salt for roughly half a cup of dressing is heavy by current taste, particularly with fine-grained table salt. Start with a scant half teaspoon and correct after the lemon goes in.
- Oil to acidSix tablespoons of oil against the juice of half a lemon (about 1 1/2 tablespoons) is a 4:1 ratio, richer than the 3:1 most people expect now. Add lemon a little at a time and taste; a whole lemon is not too much if the salad is sturdy.
- Which oilMild olive oil was usual in this period, and cottonseed oil was also widely sold. A fruity extra-virgin will dominate the chives and beet; a light olive or a neutral oil suits the dressing better.
- Mixing with a forkThe recipe calls for a fork rather than a whisk. Handled this way it is not a stable emulsion but a loose, flecked dressing that separates a little; stir it again at the table.
- ChillingHalf an hour in the refrigerator is enough for the beet and chives to tint and flavour the oil. Longer is fine, but bring it back near room temperature if the oil has clouded and thickened.
- Yield and useAbout half a cup, enough for a salad serving four to six. It is intended for crisp lettuce or a plain green salad, where the pink and the chopped beet make the effect.
Delmonico's in New York, which operated in various locations from 1827 until 1923, lent its name to a long list of dishes as home cooks recorded them: Delmonico potatoes, Delmonico steak, Delmonico pudding raally traced to the house in the case of the steak, though the link between the name and the recipes is often looser than it looks. The name functioned as a mark of metropolitan polish, the way "Waldorf" would a generation later, and a beet-flecked lemon dressing borrowed some of that gloss without much cost. Its presence in a meatless cookery book is telling. Books of this kind proliferated in the 1910s, driven partly by vegetarian and health reform movements and partly by wartime meat conservation, and they leaned hard on salads and dressings to carry interest at a table with no roast on it. A dressing that arrives pink and speckled is doing work that a plain vinaigrette cannot.