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Magenta Salad
Two bunches of cress, one large red beet, eight radishes, one-half pint mayonnaise dressing, one tablespoonful beet juice.
Wash and arrange the cress on a salad dish. Boil the beet and cut it into fancy shapes, cut the radishes into four or six pieces. Add enough beet juice to color the mayonnaise dressing. Put tablespoonfuls of it on the cress, and cover the top with the beet and radishes, arranging the latter with the red side up. The beet juice for coloring may be obtained by chopping the blood beet fine, and boiling it with a little water until the juice is extracted. Strain and boil down.
A composed, not tossed, salad whose whole point is colour. Everything depends on getting a genuinely saturated beet reduction and assembling at the last minute.
- The hinge: reduce the juice hardA watery beet liquid will thin the mayonnaise and turn it pink-grey rather than magenta. Chop the raw beet fine, barely cover with water, simmer, strain, then boil down to a syrupy tablespoon or two before stirring any into the dressing.
- "Blood beet""Blood" appears in nineteenth-century American beet variety names such as Early Blood Turnip, indicating deep crimson flesh. Any dark red beet works; golden beets give no colour and striped Chioggia very little.
- CressIn American books of this period "cress" often means watercress sold in bunches. Peppery garden cress or a small bag of upland cress will do; bunch sizes vary, so treat two bunches as an approximation rather than a fixed weight.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseOne cup. That is generous for two bunches of cress, and the recipe wants it dropped on in spoonfuls rather than tossed through, so make or measure less if you prefer a lighter plate.
- Boiling the beetWhole, unpeeled, with the root and an inch of stem left on so it does not bleed out: 35 to 50 minutes for a large beet, until a skewer slides in. Cool before peeling and cutting, or the slices will not hold an edge.
- "Fancy shapes"Small aspic or truffle cutters were sold for this kind of work and are the likely intention: stars, crescents and rounds cut from slices. A paring knife and a steady hand give the same effect.
- Radishes red side upCut each radish into four or six wedges through the root so every piece keeps a strip of red skin, then set them skin outward. The instruction is purely visual and the salad falls flat without it.
- Assemble lateBeet juice bleeds into mayonnaise and into cress within the hour, and cress wilts under dressing. Colour the mayonnaise ahead if you like, but plate no more than ten minutes before serving.
- YieldFour to six as a side salad, or four as a first course.
Magenta the colour was one of the first coal-tar dyes, generally traced to around 1859 and conventionally said to be named for the Battle of Magenta of that year; within a generation the word had spread from dress fabric to wallpaper to food, and a salad called "Magenta" would have read as fashionably modern rather than merely purple. Collections of this sort belong to the late Victorian and Edwardian vogue for the composed salad as a decorative course, when a hostess was judged on arrangement as much as flavour. The colouring trick here is worth noting: rather than reaching for a bottled dye, the cook is told to extract and reduce her own beet juice, a method still used in kitchens that want pink without additives.