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Roquefort Salad
3/4 cup Roquefort cheese. 2 hard-boiled eggs. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/2 teaspoon paprika. 3 tablespoons tarragon vinegar. 1/2 cup olive oil. 2 head crisp lettuce.
Wash lettuce. Crumble cheese into very small bits. Run eggs through ricer. Make the French dressing. Blend carefully with the cheese and mix with lettuce until each leaf is coated. Serve in salad bowl with crisp wafers.
A straightforward blue-cheese vinaigrette tossed with lettuce. The only real technique is emulsifying the dressing before the cheese goes in, so it clings to the leaves rather than sinking to the bottom of the bowl.
- Make the dressing first, then the cheeseWhisk the salt, paprika and vinegar together, then beat in the oil in a thin stream so it thickens. Only then work in the crumbled Roquefort. Adding cheese to unemulsified oil gives you a greasy bowl and clumps.
- Quantities in weightThree-quarters of a cup of crumbled Roquefort is roughly 3 to 3-1/2 oz. Half a cup of oil to 3 tablespoons vinegar works out to a little under 3:1, close to a standard modern vinaigrette rather than markedly oilier.
- Go light on the saltHalf a teaspoon assumes a mild dressing base. Roquefort is aggressively salted, so add half of it, taste after the cheese is blended, and adjust.
- A ricer for eggsPressing hard-boiled eggs through a ricer produces fine, even shreds. A coarse box grater or a fine-mesh sieve pushed through with a spoon does the same thing. The recipe never says where the eggs go after ricing; most likely they are scattered over the dressed leaves rather than worked into the dressing.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made: steep a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar with a pinch of dried tarragon is an acceptable stand-in; cider vinegar changes the character.'
- PaprikaRead this as ordinary sweet paprika, used as much for colour as flavour. Smoked paprika, a much later supermarket arrival, will dominate the cheese.
- Crisp wafersThin unsalted crackers or water biscuits. Given how salty the dressing is, avoid salted crackers.
- Yield and timingTwo heads of lettuce serve four to six as a first course. Dress it immediately before serving; the salt and vinegar in the dressing will start to soften the leaves if it stands.
Roquefort is a sheep's-milk blue from the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France, and in the early twentieth century it was the blue cheese most readily available to American cooks — Stilton and Gorgonzola were imported, if less commonly, and domestic blues barely existed. Mrs. Wilson, who wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and is usually said to have been associated with the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, was writing for households newly interested in salads as a course in their own right rather than a relish beside the meat. The dressing here can plausibly be seen as a forerunner of the bottled "blue cheese" dressing that became an American supermarket staple after mid-century, though at this stage it is still a French dressing with cheese blended in rather than the thick mayonnaise-and-buttermilk version that followed.