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Chicory Salad
Chicory, French dressing, chervil, tarragon, bread-crust, clove of garlic. Select the chicory heads, having yellow hearts and very fine leaves; cut away all the green and wash the white part, drain and shake well in a napkin or wire basket to remove all the water. Macerate with a French dressing. Chervil and tarragon can be used, or, instead of these herbs use a piece of bread-crust after rubbing a clove of garlic over it.
A three-line French salad that depends entirely on two things: bone-dry leaves and a dressing made just before serving. The garlic crust is the point of interest, and it is worth doing properly.
- Which chicory"Yellow hearts and very fine leaves" best fits blanched curly endive (frisée), sold in France as chicorée frisée. What the recipe clearly rules out is the coarse dark outer leaves, which are bitter and tough.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a plain vinaigrette, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in America today. Roughly three parts oil to one of wine vinegar, with salt and pepper, is a typical period proportion, though books of the day vary and some include mustard.
- MacerateHere it simply means dress and let stand a few minutes so the leaves soften slightly and take up the seasoning. Chicory is sturdy enough to sit five or ten minutes; a delicate lettuce would collapse.
- The chaponThe garlic-rubbed bread crust has a name: a chapon. Rub a dry crust hard with a cut clove, bury it in the leaves while they macerate, and either remove it before serving or leave it for whoever wants it. It perfumes the salad far more gently than chopped garlic in the dressing.
- Drying the leavesThe napkin or wire basket does the job of a modern salad spinner. Water clinging to the leaves dilutes the vinaigrette and stops it coating.
- The herbsChervil and tarragon are alternatives to the garlic crust, not additions. Both are used fresh and chopped at the last moment; dried tarragon is a different and much blunter flavour, and dried chervil has essentially none.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, one large head of frisée dresses a salad for four alongside a main course, with about two tablespoons of dressing per person.
The garlic-rubbed crust buried in a green salad is an old French country trick, generally traced to Provence and the southwest, where a single clove and a piece of stale bread stood in for perfuming every leaf. Chicory itself was a winter crop in an era before year-round lettuce: the pale hearts come from blanching, either by tying the outer leaves over the centre in the field or by forcing the roots in the dark, and their slight bitterness was regarded as a virtue against a sharp vinaigrette. Salad books proliferated in English and American publishing around the turn of the twentieth century, when salad shifted from a plain adjunct to a course in its own right, and their authors leaned heavily on French practice for both technique and vocabulary, including what a modern cook would call tossing and resting.