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Jardiniere Salad
Cold cooked potatoes, turnips, string beans, beets, celery, tomatoes, olives, capers, lettuce, mayonnaise or French dressing.
Take equal quantities of the vegetables, put them in a salad bowl, and add olives and capers; pour over a mayonnaise or French dressing, and garnish with lettuce leaves.
A composed salad of leftovers, written for a cook who already had a bowl of boiled vegetables in the larder. The original gives no quantities beyond "equal quantities," so the work is in the cutting and the order of assembly.
- The hinge: dress the beets separatelyBeets bleed the moment they meet oil and vinegar and will turn the whole bowl pink. Cut and dress them apart, then fold them in at the last second, or ring them around the edge as a border.
- Cut to one sizeJardiniere in French kitchen usage generally means vegetables cut to a uniform small size, most often short batons about 1/4 inch thick (even dice is closer to a macedoine). The recipe gives no cutting instruction, but uniform pieces suit the name; ragged chunks read as leftovers rather than a salad.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives none. Roughly a cup each of five or six of the listed vegetables will fill a bowl enough for about six as a side. "Equal quantities" is unqualified in the original -- it does not say whether by volume or by weight -- though equal parts by volume after cutting is the easier reading.
- TomatoesDiced tomato weeps and thins the dressing. Seed it and drain it, or leave it out of the mixing and use wedges as garnish alongside the lettuce.
- TurnipsWhite turnips, boiled until just tender and no further. Anything soft enough to mash will collapse into the dressing. Rutabaga works but is sweeter and more assertive than intended.
- SaltOlives and capers bring their own; taste before adding any. Capers of the period were packed in vinegar brine, so a rinse is worth considering.
- French dressing of the periodThree parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to an emulsion just before pouring. There is no mustard or sugar in the version this book assumes.
- Dress warm if you canBoiled potatoes and beans absorb dressing while still tepid and stay bland if dressed cold from the refrigerator. Cook, cool to just warm, dress, then chill.
Jardiniere is French kitchen shorthand for a garnish or garniture of mixed vegetables cut small and neatly arranged, the word deriving from jardin, garden. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century American and British cookery it was applied loosely to any dish of several vegetables cut to a common size, from a braised beef garnish to this cold salad. Salads were a natural subject for collections of this kind, and the household cook of the period was often urged in print not to waste the previous day's boiled vegetables. This recipe is that thrift dressed in a French name.