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Swedish Salad
One cupful of cold chicken diced, one cupful of beef tongue, one cupful of smoked salmon, one carrot, two potatoes, one cupful of string beans, French dressing, one-half pint mayonnaise dressing, pickled beet. Separate the fish into flakes and add it to the chicken. Boil the vegetables, cut them into dice, macerate them with the French dressing; mix with the meat. Put in a salad bowl and add the mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with pickled beet cut in fancy shapes.
Salade de Veau. No. 1 One pint of veal diced, French dressing, capers, parsley. Macerate the veal with the French dressing. Put into a salad bowl, and sprinkle over with chopped parsley and whole capers. Arrange sprigs of parsley around the salad.
Salade de Veau. No. 2 One pint of veal diced, French dressing, mayonnaise dressing, lettuce, capers. Macerate the veal with the French dressing. Arrange in a salad bowl on crisp lettuce leaves, cover the veal with the mayonnaise dressing, and sprinkle capers over the top.
A composed meat-and-vegetable salad of the Salade Russe family, written for a cook who already knew the two dressings by heart. The book assumes you have cold roast chicken, boiled tongue and leftover veal on hand; the shopping list is the harder part today.
- Dress the vegetables warmThe instruction to macerate the diced carrot, potato and beans in French dressing is the hinge of the dish. Do it while they are still warm from boiling so they absorb the vinaigrette; dressed cold, they stay bland and the mayonnaise sits on top of them.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn an American cookbook of this period this is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar, though period recipes vary. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseThat is one cup. Homemade mayonnaise of the period was raw-yolk based and eaten the day it was made; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the finished salad refrigerated, since it contains cooked meat and fish and no acid strong enough to preserve it.
- Beef tongueSold cured or fresh at butchers and some Latin and Eastern European markets. It needs simmering three hours or so until tender, then peeling while hot. Good deli-sliced tongue, diced, is a reasonable substitute; corned beef is a distant one.
- Smoked salmonThe recipe says to separate the fish into flakes, which points to hot-smoked salmon rather than the thin cold-smoked slices sold as lox. Cold-smoked will work if you tear it into ribbons, but it is saltier and will dominate the bowl.
- Quantities and yieldThree cups of meat and fish plus the vegetables -- a carrot, two potatoes and a cup of beans, nearer three cups once diced -- makes a salad for six as a main course. Cut everything to an even dice so no single element reads as a chunk.
- The pickled beet garnishCut the beet at the last moment and lay it on top rather than stirring it in, or the whole bowl turns pink. A small aspic cutter or a paring knife will produce the "fancy shapes" the recipe calls for.
- A pint of diced vealFor the two veal salads that follow, a pint of dice is about a pound of cooked meat, from a braised or poached shoulder or breast. Veal is expensive and can be hard to find; cold poached chicken or turkey behaves the same way with the capers and parsley.
Salads built from cold cooked meat, root vegetables and mayonnaise circulated through late nineteenth-century cookbooks under a shifting set of national labels: Russian salad, Italian salad, and here Swedish. The Swedish claim probably rests on the salmon and beets, which echo the herring-and-beet sillsallad of a Scandinavian smorgasbord, though the construction is straight French restaurant technique, and the two Salade de Veau recipes on the same page keep the French names outright. A bowl of diced leftovers bound with mayonnaise and crowned with cut beets could be sent to table as a dish in its own right.