Salad, Boiled
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-2 heads of celery, 1 pint of French beans, lettuce and endive. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Boil the celery and beans separately until tender, and cut the celery into pieces about 2 inches long. Put these into a salad-bowl or dish; pour over either of the salad dressings, and garnish the dish with a little lettuce finely chopped, blanched endive, or a few tufts of boiled cauliflower.
This composition, if less agreeable than vegetables in their raw state, is more wholesome; for salads, however they may SALAD DRESSING. be compounded, when eaten uncooked, prove to some people indigestible. Tarragon, chervil, burnet, and boiled onion may be added to the above salad with advantage, as also slices of cold meat, poultry or fish.
SEASONABLE from July to October.
Salad Dressing. (Excellent.) - INGREDIENTS for dressing for small salad. -1 teaspoonful of mixed mustard, 1 teaspoonful of pounded sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of salad oil, 4 tablespoonfuls of milk, 2 tablespoonfuls of Champion's vinegar, cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 3d.
Put the mixed mustard into a salad-bowl with the sugar, and add the oil drop by drop, carefully stirring and mixing all these ingredients well together. Proceed in this manner with the milk and vinegar, which must be added very gradually, or the sauce will curdle. Put in the seasoning, when the mixture will be ready for use. If this dressing is properly made, it will have a soft, creamy appearance, and will be found very delicious with crab or cold fried fish (the latter cut into dice), as well as with salads. In mixing salad dressings, the ingredients cannot be added too gradually, or stirred too much.
This recipe can be confidently recommended by the editress, to whom it was given by an intimate friend noted for her salads.
Salad Dressing. (Excellent.) - INGREDIENTS for dressing for large salad. -4 eggs, 1 teaspoonful of mixed mustard, 1/4 teaspoonful of white pepper, half that quantity of cayenne, salt to taste, 4 tablespoonfuls of cream, vinegar. AVERAGE Cost, 8d.
Boil the eggs until hard, which will be in about 1/4 hour or 20 minutes; put them SALAD IN JELLY. into cold water, take off the shells, and pound the yolks in a mortar to a smooth paste. Then add all the other ingredients, except the vinegar, and stir them well until SALAD DRESSING. the whole are thoroughly incorporated one with the other. Pour in sufficient vinegar to make it of the consistency of cream, taking care to add but little at a time. The mixture will then be ready for use. Oil may be substituted for the cream.
Note.- The whites of the eggs, cut into rings, will serve very well as a garnish to the salad.
Salad Dressing. (Excellent.) -INGREDIENTS for dressing for 1 salad.-1 egg, 1 teaspoonful of salad oil, 1 teaspoonful of mixed mustard, ½ teaspoonful of salt, spoonful of pounded sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 6 tablespoonfuls of cream. AVERAGE COST, 6d. tea- Prepare and mix the ingredients by the preceding recipe, and be very particular that the whole is well stirred.
Note. In making salads, the vegetables, &c., should never be added to the sauce very long before they are wanted for table; the dressing, however, may always be prepared some hours before required. Where salads are much in request, it is a good plan to bottle off sufficient dressing for a few days' consumption, as thereby, much time and trouble are saved. If kept in a cool place, it will remain good for 4 or 5 days.
SALAD, SUMMER. at least 5 minutes, when the preparation will be ready for table. This is the very simple and expeditious mode of preparing a salad generally adopted by our French neighbours, who are so noted for the delicious manner in which they dress their bowl. Success will not be obtained if the right vinegar is not procured, therefore we advise our friends who wish to excel in making a French salad to procure a bottle of the best French vinegar, flavoured with tarragon or not, as taste may dictate.
Those persons living in or near London, can purchase the vinegar of Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell, Soho Square, at whose establishment the quality of this important ingredient in a salad can be relied on.
TIME. To be stirred at least 5 minutes, after all the ingredients are put in.
SEASONABLE.-Plentiful in summer, but scarce and dear during the winter season.
Salad, Fresh Fruit. (A Dessert Dish.)-Fruit salads are made by stripping the fruit from the stalks, piling it on a dish, and sprinkling over it finely-pounded sugar.
They may be made of strawberries, currants, or any of these fruits mixed; peaches also make a very good salad. After the sugar
A Victorian composed salad of cooked vegetables, dressed and garnished, intended to be gentler on the digestion than raw greens. The quantities are generous and the method forgiving.
- A pint of French beansBeans are measured by volume here, as elsewhere in the book: a pint of trimmed green beans is very roughly 10-12 oz / 300-350 g. Two heads of celery means two whole bunches, not two ribs.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyCelery and beans want quite different times — beans 4-6 minutes until just tender, celery 10-15 depending on thickness. Boiling them together guarantees one will be wrong.
- Cool and dry before dressingThe hinge of the dish. Drain the vegetables well and let them cool completely; dressing added to hot, wet vegetables thins out and slides off, and the salad turns watery in the bowl.
- Dress at the last momentThe book's own note applies here: vegetables should not sit in the dressing long before serving. Make the dressing hours ahead if convenient, combine just before the dish goes to table.
- Champion's vinegarA proprietary British bottled vinegar of the period, no longer sold; the book treats the brand as a mark of reliable quality. Any good vinegar works; a white wine vinegar gives a cleaner result with the milk-and-oil dressing.
- The milk dressing will curdle if hurriedOil, then milk, then vinegar, each added a few drops at a time with constant stirring; the book says the ingredients "cannot be added too gradually, or stirred too much." The emulsion is fragile because it has no egg to stabilise it.
- The egg dressingFour eggs boiled 15-20 minutes, as directed, are overcooked by modern standards, though a very firm yolk does pound to a smooth paste readily. Ten to twelve minutes gives a firm yolk that still mashes well.
- Yield and seasonServes six as a side salad. "Seasonable July to October" reflects outdoor English growing; year-round beans and celery make the timing irrelevant now.
Boiled or "composed" salads of this kind were common in nineteenth-century English cookery, where raw vegetables carried a lingering reputation for being hard to digest — a belief this entry states outright. Cooking the celery and beans was as much a medical courtesy to the guest as a matter of taste, and the raw lettuce and endive survive only as garnish. The dressings are more revealing still: the milk-based one is a household economy, standing in for a proper oil-heavy French dressing, while the pounded hard-boiled yolk version is often said to anticipate the salad creams that dominated British salads well into the twentieth century. The named recommendation of Crosse and Blackwell of Soho Square is typical of the Beeton books, which routinely pointed readers to specific London suppliers for ingredients whose quality could not be assumed.