Salad, Summer
INGREDIENTS for salad for 8 persons.-3 lettuces, 2 handfuls of mustard-and-cress, 10 young radishes, a few slices of cucumber. AVERAGE COST, with dressing, 10d.
SALAD, WINTER.
SALMON, BOILED. sauce, however, may always be prepared a few hours beforehand, and when required to use, the herbs laid lightly over it.
SEASONABLE from the end of September to March.
Let the herbs be as fresh as possible for a salad, and, if at all stale or dead-looking, let them lie in water for an hour or two, which will very much refresh them.
Wash and carefully pick them over, remove any decayed or wormeaten leaves, and drain them tho- Boiled. roughly by swing- Celery.
Chicken.
Fresh Fruit.
SALAD IN BOWL.
The text as printed here is a scrambled fragment — the summer salad ingredients have collided with headings for winter salad and boiled salmon, and the instructions break off mid-word. What survives is an ingredient list for eight and Mrs Beeton's method for handling salad greens, which is the useful part.
- The hinge: dry the leavesThe instruction that matters is the one cut off mid-sentence — "drain them tho[roughly] by swing[ing]". The text does not say what the leaves were swung in; a wire salad basket and a clean cloth were both period methods. A salad spinner does the same work. Dressing will not cling to wet leaves, it slides off and pools.
- Reviving limp greensAn hour or two in cold water is longer than needed for modern bagged leaves, which turn slimy. Fifteen to twenty minutes in ice water is enough to re-crisp a wilted head of lettuce, and it should then be dried at once.
- Mustard-and-cressA mixed seedling crop of white mustard and garden cress, grown in shallow trays and cut young — a standard Victorian windowsill item, not the same as watercress. Substitute a couple of handfuls of peppery microgreens, or watercress with the coarse stems removed.
- Three lettucesThese were most likely cos or cabbage (butterhead) heads rather than anything resembling a modern iceberg. Two large romaine hearts plus a butterhead gets you to roughly the same volume for eight.
- RadishesTen young radishes for eight people means they are seasoning, not bulk — sliced thin rather than served whole. Any coarse, hollow or hot radish should be discarded; the point is crispness.
- No dressing hereThe recipe costs the salad "with dressing", but no dressing is given on this page; Mrs Beeton's dressings are separate entries. The surviving line about the sauce being prepared beforehand and the herbs laid lightly over it sits among the jumbled headings and cannot be safely assigned to this entry. Use a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing, three parts to one, or one of Mrs Beeton's own salad dressings if you want the period version.
- Average cost, 10d.Ten pence in pre-decimal currency. The costings were a selling point of the book, not a modern guide to anything.
- SeasonableThe "end of September to March" line has migrated in from the winter salad entry. A summer salad of lettuce, cress, radish and cucumber is a May-to-September dish in an unheated garden.
Mrs Beeton's salads sit in the vegetable chapters as an afterthought to the joint, which is how the Victorian middle-class table treated raw greens: a light accompaniment to cold meat, dressed at the last moment and never allowed to stand. The care lavished here on picking over the leaves and swinging them dry reflects a real hazard of the period rather than fussiness: greens came from gardens dusty, gritty and often carrying slugs or the "wormeaten leaves" she tells the cook to remove, and salad crops were grown on land manured with city waste. Mustard-and-cress, which appears in her summer salads, was cheap and quick enough to raise on a windowsill or in a garden frame in ten days, and was one of the few salad plants a household could reliably supply itself. The jumbled state of this particular entry is a reminder that All About Cookery and its relatives were compiled and recompiled from the original 1861 Book of Household Management for decades after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865, with cross-references and headings shuffled from edition to edition.