Home › Recipes › Italian Salad
Italian Salad
Pint of green peas, half a pint of string beans, half a pint of carrot, half a pint of turnip, chervil, tarragon, chives, parsley, French dressing, beets, potatoes.
Put into a salad bowl which have been previously cooked, the peas, beans, carrot and turnip diced, and add finely chopped chervil, tarragon, chives and parsley; macerate with a French dressing. Cut beets and potatoes in an eighth of an inch slices, cut into fancy shapes with French vegetable cutters. Arrange the potatoes and beets alternately around the base.
A composed macédoine of cooked vegetables dressed while still warm, with a border of cut beet and potato. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to boil vegetables to the right point, so the useful work is in timing and assembly.
- Dress the vegetables warm"Macerate with a French dressing" implies the vegetables sit in the dressing rather than being tossed at the last moment; dressing them while still warm from draining is the usual way to get them to take it up, though the recipe does not say so.
- Cook each vegetable separatelyThe original lists them together but they are not interchangeable in the pot. Carrot and turnip want 6-8 minutes diced, beans 4-5, peas 2-3. Cook, drain, and combine only after all are done.
- Volumes are of prepared vegetableA pint is 2 cups, half a pint 1 cup. Read these as measures of diced or shelled vegetable, not whole: a pint of shelled peas is roughly 2 lb in the pod, or about two-thirds of a 1 lb bag of frozen.
- French dressingIn a book of this period this means a plain vinaigrette, about three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name. Figure 1/3 to 1/2 cup for this quantity.
- The herbsChervil and tarragon are the character of the dish, and chervil in particular loses almost everything in drying, so use it fresh or leave it out. If chervil is unavailable, a little more parsley plus a few tarragon leaves comes closest. Chop all the herbs at the last moment.
- French vegetable cuttersThese are the small tinned aspic or truffle cutters still sold in sets - rounds, crescents, diamonds, stars. A 1-inch round cutter or a paring knife does the same job. Slice the cooked beets and potatoes as close to the eighth of an inch called for as you can manage.
- Keep the beets apartCut and dress the beet slices separately and lay them on the platter last. Left touching the potato or folded into the macédoine, they bleed and the whole salad turns pink within minutes.
- Yield and serviceAbout five cups of dressed vegetables, enough for six as a salad course. Chill briefly before arranging the border, and serve within an hour or two - the potatoes go mealy and the dressing separates on standing overnight.
A salad of small-diced cooked vegetables bound in dressing is the classic macédoine of French kitchen practice, and by the late nineteenth century it circulated in English-language cookbooks under a shifting set of national names - Italian salad, Russian salad, salade à la macédoine - which had less to do with any particular country than with the fashion for giving composed dishes a continental label. The version here belongs to the era of the formal salad course, when a vegetable salad was expected to be built and bordered rather than tossed, and when a household aspiring to elegance owned a set of small tinned cutters for exactly this purpose. The fancy-cut beet and potato border is the whole argument in miniature.