Home › Salad Dressings › Country Salad (See cut facing page Cut cold)
Country Salad (See cut facing page Cut cold)
(See cut facing page 86.) Cut cold boiled corned beef or tongue into thin strips and pile in the centre of a serving-dish.
Cook potato balls in meat broth until tender; blanch and cool, roll in mayonnaise or boiled dressing, and dispose about the meat. About these put a ring of celery cut fine, then cooked carrot and turnip cut in straws. Garnish with parsley and cucumber pickles cut in fans. Serve with additional dressing.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, built for the camera as much as the table — the original ran with a photographic plate opposite page 86. Everything is cooked and cooled in advance, so it assembles in minutes.
- Potato ballsCut with a Parisienne scoop (melon baller) from peeled raw potatoes; a waxy variety holds its shape. Simmer them in the corned beef or tongue broth as directed, which gives them the seasoning of the meat.
- "Blanch and cool"Coming after the potatoes are cooked, this most likely means to drain them and rinse briefly in cold water to stop the cooking and wash off surface starch, then dry them well. Wet potato will thin the mayonnaise.
- Boiled dressingThe period alternative to mayonnaise: a cooked custard of egg, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, mustard and a little butter or cream. It is sharper and less rich than mayonnaise, and it clings to warm-ish vegetables without breaking.
- Corned beef or tongueThe recipe calls for cold boiled meat, so leftovers from a boiled dinner would serve. Deli corned beef works; whole cooked tongue is now a butcher's order in most places. Cut across the grain into thin strips.
- Vegetables cut in strawsCarrot and turnip in julienne, boiled until just tender and cooled. Better cooked apart, as turnip will flavour anything sharing its pot.
- Cucumber pickle fansSlice a small gherkin lengthwise almost to the stem end in four or five cuts, then press the slices apart. Purely decorative.
- Assembly and yieldBuild the rings on a flat platter shortly before serving; the mayonnaise-coated potatoes weep if they sit. No quantities or yield are given, so scale to the meat you have.
This is a salad made from the remains of a boiled dinner, dressed up for the plate. Boiled corned beef or tongue with root vegetables was familiar cooking in American and British households, and the cold meat that followed had to be made to look like something new — hence the concentric rings, the scooped potato balls and the pickle fans. Cookbooks of the turn of the century used a good deal of this kind of arrangement, and the fashion is generally traced to French service passing into English and American domestic manuals, where salade came to mean a composed, garnished construction rather than leaves in a bowl. The instruction to cook the potatoes in the meat broth is the thrifty heart of it. Why the dish is called "country" is not explained in the recipe.