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Anchovy Salad
Six anchovies, two heads of lettuce, six button onions, parsley, two lemons, one tablespoonful of oil.
Remove the bones, heads and tails of the anchovies. Wash the lettuce and arrange it on a salad dish. Add the onions chopped finely, parsley, sliced lemon and anchovies. Pour over the juice of a lemon mixed with a tablespoonful of oil.
A plain Edwardian composed salad that depends entirely on the quality of three things: the anchovies, the oil and the lettuce. A few of its terms have shifted meaning since.
- The anchovies"Remove the bones, heads and tails" tells you these were whole salt-cured fish, not the trimmed fillets sold in oil today. If you buy salt-packed anchovies, rinse them well, soak 20-30 minutes in cold water or milk, then split and lift out the backbone. Tinned fillets need only a brief rinse and blotting; twelve fillets equal the six fish called for.
- Button onionsSmall white pickling onions, roughly an inch across, sold raw at the period greengrocer. Six chopped fine is roughly a quarter of a cup. Shallots or the white parts of spring onions give a closer flavour than a modern cooking onion, which is harsher raw.
- The two lemonsOne is sliced for the dish, the other juiced for the dressing. Slice thinly and cut away the peel and pith unless you want the bitterness; sliced lemon here is likely as much garnish as something to be eaten.
- The dressing is lemon-ledThe juice of one lemon, some two to three tablespoons, against a single tablespoon of oil, roughly the reverse of the usual modern vinaigrette ratio. It is deliberately sharp against the salt of the fish, but if it reads as too austere, adding oil rather than reducing lemon keeps the intent. Use a good olive oil; the recipe gives it nowhere to hide.
- SaltNone is called for and none should be added until you have tasted. Salt-cured anchovies carry the whole seasoning of the dish.
- LettuceTwo heads means two of the small soft butterhead or cos types of the day, not two supermarket iceberg globes. Dry the leaves thoroughly or the dressing slides off and pools.
- Assembly and yieldDress at the table, not in advance; lemon juice wilts tender leaves within minutes. Serves four as a first course, two as a light lunch with bread.
Anchovies were a fixture of the British table long before this book, largely in cooked and bottled forms: anchovy essence, anchovy paste, anchovy butter, and the potted relishes that flavoured Victorian toast and gravies. Serving them plainly, boned and laid on leaves with lemon and oil, fits the Mediterranean influence that was reaching English and American salad books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the composed salad moved away from boiled dressings towards something closer to the French model. Small single-subject collections like Ninety-Nine Salads belong to a period when salad was being argued for as a proper course rather than a garnish, and when imported olive oil and lemons were more widely available than they had been.