Salad, French
- INGREDIENTS. - Lettuces; a little chopped burnet. To every 4 tablespoonfuls of oil allow 1½ of either tarragon or plain French vinegar; 1 saltspoonful of salt, 1/2 sultspoonful of pepper. Wash the lettuces, shake them in a cloth, and cut them into inch lengths. Put the lettuce into a salad-bowl, sprinkle over the chopped burnet, and mix these well together. Put the salt and pepper into the salad-spoon, moisten with the vinegar, disperse this amongst the salad, pour the oil over, and mix the whole well together for fuls of wine or brandy, or 3 tablespoonfuls of liqueur, should be poured in the middle of the fruit; and, when the flavour is liked, a little pounded cinnamon may be added.
In helping the fruit, it should be lightly stirred, that the wine and sugar may be equally distributed.
SEASONABLE in summer.
A plain dressed green salad, notable mainly for its herb and for the order of operations, which does most of the work. Note that the page as printed has suffered a compositor's error: partway through, the text jumps into an unrelated fruit-salad entry, so the instruction beginning "mix the whole well together for" simply breaks off.
- The text is brokenEverything from "fuls of wine or brandy" onward belongs to a different recipe — a macerated fruit salad — and has nothing to do with lettuce. Treat the green salad as ending at "mix the whole well together."
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is generally reckoned at about a quarter of a teaspoon. So the dressing is roughly 4 tablespoons oil, 1½ tablespoons vinegar, ¼ teaspoon salt, ⅛ teaspoon pepper. The recipe gives no quantity of lettuce; the seasoning is stated as a proportion to the oil.
- BurnetSalad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), a low herb with a mild cucumber flavour, common in Victorian kitchen gardens and now mostly grown by herb specialists. Chopped cucumber peel, borage leaves or a little chervil give a similar cool note.
- French vinegar"Plain French vinegar" means ordinary wine vinegar, white or red, as against malt. Tarragon vinegar is the same thing steeped with the herb, and is easily made at home or bought.
- The order mattersSalt and pepper are dissolved in the vinegar before the oil goes on. Salt will not dissolve in oil, and leaves already coated in oil take the seasoning poorly — this is the hinge of the method.
- Drying the leaves"Shake them in a cloth" is not optional fussiness. Water left on the leaves dilutes the vinegar and stops the oil clinging, and the dressing slides to the bottom of the bowl.
- Dress at the tableCut and dressed lettuce wilts quickly. Mix the salad and the dressing only as it is going out.
Nineteenth-century cookery writing often distinguished between an English salad, which was dressed with a thick cooked or egg-based cream, and a French one, which meant nothing more than oil, vinegar and seasoning stirred through the leaves at the last moment — the distinction the title appears to be drawing here. Salad burnet was a standard kitchen-garden herb from the sixteenth century onwards, praised by early writers for its cucumber scent in wine and salads, and it lingers in nineteenth-century cookery books long after it had begun to disappear from actual gardens. The entry also shows the machinery of a large reference cookbook under strain: All About Cookery and its relatives were reset and abridged repeatedly after 1861, and the fruit-salad text spliced onto the end of this page is plainly a broken join rather than anything the original compiler intended.