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Cowslip-and-Cream-Cheese Salad
(See cut facing page 58.) Cook the cowslip leaves until tender in boiling salted water, reserving a few choice leaves with blossoms for a garnish. Chop fine, season to taste with salt and paprica, press into a mould, and set aside to become chilled. Slice chilled cream cheese (Neufchatel or cottage) in uniform slices, and arrange at the sides of the mound. Serve with French or mayonnaise dressing.
The dish itself is simple — a moulded mound of cooked greens flanked by sliced fresh cheese — but the green at its centre cannot be recommended today, and the name does not reliably tell you which plant is meant.
- What "cowslip" means hereIn American cookbooks of this period "cowslip" usually means the marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, a wetland plant gathered in early spring for greens. In Britain the same word means Primula veris, an unrelated meadow primrose. The recipe gives no botanical name and no way to tell them apart, which is the first reason not to follow it.
- The specific toxinMarsh marigold contains protoanemonin, an irritant found across the buttercup family, which can blister the mouth and gut and cause vomiting and diarrhoea. It breaks down with heat, which is why the plant is cooked and not used raw; some nineteenth-century sources direct that the water be changed more than once, where this recipe calls for a single boiling in salted water.
- Raw garnishThe instruction to reserve "a few choice leaves with blossoms for a garnish" puts uncooked plant material directly on the plate. Whatever the identification, that part of the dish is never heated at all.
- Misidentification riskMarsh marigold grows in the same wet ground as lesser celandine, whose early basal leaves are easy to confuse with it, and other seriously poisonous wetland plants such as false hellebore and water hemlock share the habitat. Wild-greens gathering of this kind depends on skills the recipe assumes and does not teach.
- Primula is no better guideIf the true cowslip is meant, wild Primula veris is uncommon in places and protected in some jurisdictions, and its leaves were more usually eaten in salads than boiled.
- If you want the dishThe moulded-greens-and-fresh-cheese idea is sound. Use a current recipe built on a cultivated green rather than adapting this one.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties — Hill was a graduate of the Boston Cooking School and editor of the Boston Cooking-School Magazine, though the book was not issued by the school — and it belongs to a brief fashion for putting wild spring greens into the elaborate moulded salads then in vogue. Marsh marigold, dandelion, pokeweed shoots and milkweed were all still gathered as "spring tonics" in rural New England and the Midwest, on the old idea that a winter of salt meat and root vegetables left the blood in need of thinning; cookbooks of the 1890s picked up these country foods and dressed them in mayonnaise and Neuchâtel for city tables. Neuchâtel itself was a novelty in America at the time, generally traced to William Lawrence at Chester, Orange County, New York, in the early 1870s, and sold as a soft unripened cheese. The reference to "the cut facing page 58" is a reminder that these books sold partly on their illustrations, which showed the reader what a properly built moulded salad was supposed to look like.