Radish Salad
One bead of lettuce, small round radishes, olives, French dressing. On a salad dish arrange two light crisp lettuce leaves for each person, in the center of these leaves arrange the radishes (which have been cut in quarters) with the red side up, around them put a border of olives, which have been cut in quarters lengthwise, and stoned. Just as the salad is served pour over the French dressing.
American Corn Salad. (Mrs. Marshall.) Two or three young heads of corn, milk, salt, butter, pepper. Remove the outer leaves and sticky part from the heads of corn and put them into a stew pan of boiling milk and water that is seasoned with salt and a pat of butter, just bring to a boil, remove any scum and simmer gently for fifty or sixty minutes, then take up and drain them on a hair sieve, put a clean wet cloth over the corn and leave till cold. Place the corns on a flat dish, season with pepper and salt, mask them with the prepared sauce and serve. Sauce for American Corn Salad.
Yolks of three raw eggs, one pint of salad oil, one teaspoonful of raw English mustard, one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, twelve raw oysters, coralline pepper, one gill of cream, one onion.
Mix the yolks of the eggs into the oil, add to it the mustard, vinegar and the oysters that have been pounded and rubbed through a sieve, add a good dust of pepper, the stiffly whipped cream and the onion finely chopped. Mix all together and use.
Three linked items run together here: a plain radish salad, Mrs. Marshall's boiled corn, and an uncooked oyster-and-egg sauce that is the reason for the caution above. The radish salad and the boiled corn are straightforward; the sauce is not.
- The sauce is the problemRaw egg yolks and twelve raw oysters, pounded to a paste, folded into oil and cream and served cold over cooled corn — nothing in it is ever heated. Raw oysters carry Vibrio species and norovirus, and pulverising them spreads any contamination through the whole batch; the raw yolks add a Salmonella risk. Held at room temperature while it is mixed and masked over the corn, it is a growth medium. If you want a dressing for cold corn, use a current recipe.
- "One bead of lettuce"A printer's error for one head. Two crisp leaves per person means a firm-hearted lettuce — romaine or Little Gem hold up better under dressing than butterhead.
- Fifty to sixty minutes of cornCorn of this period was not the supersweet hybrid sold today, and long boiling was the normal instruction. Modern sweet corn is at its best after three to five minutes and turns to mush and starch after an hour. Boil briefly, then cool if you want it as a salad.
- "Heads of corn"Ears. The "sticky part" is the silk. Cooking in milk and water with butter and salt is still a usable method.
- Coralline pepperA bright coral-red pepper preparation sold ready-made in this period, Marshall among the sellers, and no longer available. Plain cayenne is the nearest thing in flavour terms.
- Raw English mustardDry mustard powder, not the made-up paste in a jar. "Raw" simply distinguishes the unmixed powder.
- A gill and a hair sieveA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, so one gill of cream is 5 imperial fl oz, about 140-150 ml. A hair sieve was woven horsehair; a fine nylon or stainless sieve does the same work.
- French dressing, then and nowIn books of this period French dressing means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion — no sugar, no ketchup, nothing red. Roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, dressed at the table so the lettuce stays crisp.
"Mrs. Marshall" is Agnes Bertha Marshall, who ran a cookery school in Mortimer Street, London, sold branded equipment and moulds, and published a string of successful books in the 1880s and 1890s; she is best remembered now for her work on ices. The dish is presumably titled "American Corn Salad" because corn on the cob was still something of a novelty on English tables at the time — an imported curiosity rather than a staple, worth a recipe of its own and, one imagines, worth naming by its country of origin. Compilations like Ninety-Nine Salads are generally said to have borrowed freely from named authorities, which may be why her recipe sits here with an attribution while the radish salad above it has none. The elaborate oyster sauce is characteristic of the period's taste for masking a plain boiled vegetable in something rich and expensive, and for using shellfish as a seasoning rather than a centrepiece.