Home › Salad Dressings › Duck-and-Olive Salad
Duck-and-Olive Salad
Cut the meat from a duck in small pieces, and slice pim-olas very thin; use two tablespoonfuls of pim-olas to a cup of meat. Serve on a bed of cress with a French dressing.
A leftovers salad in three lines, from the era when a roast duck was expected to reappear at a second meal. The only puzzling word is the olive.
- Pim-olas"Pimola" was a trade name for a pitted green olive stuffed with sweet red pepper — what a modern label calls pimiento-stuffed. Any Manzanilla stuffed olive works; slice them into thin coins rather than chopping, so the red shows.
- ProportionTwo tablespoons of sliced olives per cup of duck is the whole balance of the dish. Olives here are seasoning, not a component; more than this and the duck disappears under brine.
- The duckThe recipe says only to cut the meat from a duck; in a salad of this kind that almost certainly means cold cooked duck picked from the carcass. Breast alone is neat but dry; include the darker leg meat. A roast duck will give something in the region of 2 to 3 cups of picked meat.
- Serve it cold, not chilled hardDuck fat sets waxy straight from the refrigerator. Let the picked meat stand at cool room temperature for fifteen or twenty minutes before dressing so the fat softens and the dressing clings.
- CressPeriod recipes mean watercress or peppery garden cress, used as a bed rather than tossed. Watercress is the closer match to the intent; it wilts fast, so dress the duck separately and pile it on at the last moment.
- French dressing of 1900Not the sweet orange bottled stuff. In period usage it means oil and vinegar, commonly somewhere around three to one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. A little Dijon holds it together and suits the duck.
- YieldFigure a generous half cup of dressed meat per person as a first course, or a full cup as a lunch salad with bread.
Duck with olives is an old pairing — canard aux olives, the braised French version, appears in nineteenth-century French cookery — and this is its cold, thrifty descendant, built for the household that had served roast duck the night before. Pimiento-stuffed olives were being sold in the United States under brand names, of which Pimola was one, and the recipe's use of "pim-olas" as a plain noun suggests the brand name was doing duty for the type. The brevity is characteristic of the genre: the recipe supplies only the ratio of olive to meat, leaving French dressing and the picking of a carcass unexplained.