Lamb Salad
Cold cooked lamb, sliced cooked potatoes, pickled gherkins, capers and small pickled onions, chives, French dressing, hard boiled eggs, tarragon leaves. Cut slices of cold cooked lamb a quarter of an inch in thickness; arrange on a deep dish in straight rows over a bed of sliced cooked potatoes. Decorate the whole with slices of pickled gherkins, capers, small pickled onions, and chopped chives. Macerate with a French dressing. Garnish the dish with hard boiled eggs, also a few tarragon leaves. Serve without stirring so as to avoid breaking the leaves.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and written in the shorthand of a period cook who expected you to judge quantities by eye. The whole point is that it goes to the table undisturbed, so build it on the dish you mean to serve it from.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn a book of this era "French dressing" is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken to combine. It is not the sweet orange bottled product that later took the name.
- "Macerate" here means dress and restSpoon the dressing over the arranged salad and leave it a short while in a cool place so the lamb and potato take it up. It does not mean stir -- the recipe says so at the end -- and it does not mean marinate overnight.
- Dress the potatoes while warmSliced potatoes absorb vinaigrette when warm and shed it when cold. Season and moisten them as they come off the heat, then let them cool before the lamb goes on top.
- Quantities are left to the cookNothing is specified. For four people, figure on about a pound of cold lamb, a pound of waxy potatoes, three hard-boiled eggs and half a cup of dressing, with the pickles used as decoration rather than bulk.
- Cutting the lambA quarter-inch slice is thicker than deli-cut and is what makes the straight rows hold their shape. Slice across the grain from a cold roast leg or shoulder; leftover chops will not give you slices of any length.
- TarragonFresh leaves only. The closing instruction about not breaking the leaves is the reason the salad is not tossed, and dried tarragon defeats the purpose entirely.
- Capers and picklesRinse and drain brined capers and blot the gherkins, or the dressing turns thin and sharp as they weep. Small pickled onions are usually the silverskin sort sold as cocktail onions.
- ServingA shallow platter suits it better than the "deep dish" of the original, since the rows are meant to be seen. Serve cool, not refrigerator-cold, or the lamb fat sets firm.
Cold-meat salads like this one are the practical face of a period when a large roast joint was the norm and Monday's dinner was made out of Sunday's. The construction resembles the French salade composée, in which the elements are laid out in ranks and dressed in place rather than mixed, and it belongs to the same family as the salade russe and the moulded meat salads that filled the salad chapters of many Anglo-American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. The gherkins, capers, pickled onions and tarragon are conventional sharp accompaniments to lamb and mutton in that tradition. The instruction about not breaking the garnish suggests the dish was judged first by eye.