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Truffle Salad
Six truffles, three artichokes, four eggs, mustard, three gills of oil and tarragon, clove of garlic, mayonnaise, tarragon, chervil, chives, parsley. Cut the truffles into pieces, put them into a bowl with the artichoke bottoms, previously cooked and cut into eight pieces. Rub through a sieve the hard-boiled egg yolks, lay them in a bowl with the mustard, work well together, add gradually the oil and tarragon vinegar; rub the bottom of a salad bowl with a clove of garlic, set the truffles in, and the artichokes over; cover all with a mayonnaise, mixing in also some tarragon, chervil, chives and parsley, all finely chopped.
A composed salad from the era when truffles were expensive rather than unobtainable. The original assumes a cook who already knows how to build an egg-yolk dressing, so the quantities are loose in places.
- Three gills of oilA gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American measure, 5 fl oz in British, so three gills is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 cups (355-425 ml). Either way it is a great deal of dressing for six truffles and three artichokes; half of it will dress the salad generously, and the remainder keeps for a day or two refrigerated.
- The dressing is not mayonnaiseSieved hard-boiled yolks worked with mustard, then let down with oil and tarragon vinegar, makes a thick cooked-yolk sauce rather than an emulsified mayonnaise. The recipe then calls separately for mayonnaise to cover the salad, meaning either a jar or bowl of ready-made mayonnaise or the sauce you have just built used in that role. Making both is not wrong, but one dressing is enough.
- Mustard, unmeasuredNo quantity is given. A teaspoon of smooth Dijon per four yolks is a reasonable starting point: enough to season without dominating.
- Four eggs, yolks onlyOnly the sieved yolks go into the dressing. The whites are left over; chopped fine, they are a conventional garnish for this kind of salad.
- Artichoke bottomsThese are the fleshy bases with choke and leaves removed, not the hearts sold whole in jars. Boil fresh ones in acidulated water 20-25 minutes until a knife slides in easily, or use good-quality tinned or frozen bottoms, drained and patted dry.
- TrufflesThe truffles intended here would have been black winter truffles, often tinned and already cooked. At current prices, 1-2 oz of fresh black truffle sliced thin gives the same effect; summer truffles are cheaper and much milder. Avoid truffle oil here, which reads as chemical against fresh herbs.
- Rubbing the bowl with garlicA cut clove wiped round the inside of the bowl is meant to perfume, not flavour. Do not chop garlic into the salad; it would flatten the truffle.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth using rather than plain wine vinegar, since the recipe leans on tarragon twice. About 3 tablespoons to 1.5 cups of oil gives a rich, barely sharp dressing.
- Timing and yieldDress no more than 20 minutes before serving; the herbs darken and the artichokes weep. Serves six as a first course.
Truffle salads belong to the late nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire, where a dish of sliced black truffle dressed with oil and vinegar was a way of showing off an ingredient rather than cooking it. The combination with artichoke bottoms and fines herbes -- tarragon, chervil, chives and parsley, the standard French quartet -- is straight out of classical French practice, and the sieved-yolk dressing is of a kind with the older English "salad sauce" made before emulsified mayonnaise became a household staple. That such a recipe was included in a printed collection of salads says something about who such books were for: households aspiring to a table that looked like a Paris restaurant's. Tinned truffles from the Périgord are generally said to have been a common import in this period, which would help explain why the recipe treats six of them as an ordinary shopping list item.