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Italian Salad
(MISS COHEN.) INGREDIENTS. 2 herrings, soaked in milk over night. 3 boiled potatoes, cut in very small dice. 2 tablespoonfuls of cucumber pickles, chopped fine.
1 tablespoonful of capers, chopped fine. 2 small boiled beets, cut fine. ½ a pound (I cup) of cold roast chicken, cut fine. 2 herrings, soaked in milk 1/2 a pound (I cup) of boiled tongue, cut fine. 2 apples, pared and finely chopped. 2 carrots, cooked and finely chopped.
I celery root, cooked and chopped. 1/2 a cup of pecan nuts, broken fine.
A little onion juice.
Method. - Mix the ingredients together thoroughly; add mayonnaise to moisten well. Serve on a flat dish. Mask the top with mayonnaise,
This is a Russian-style composed salad under an Italian name, and it is essentially an assembly job: the only real work is cutting everything to the same small dice. Two points decide whether it succeeds — the herring must be properly desalted, and the beets must be kept separate until the last moment.
- The herringsThese are salt-cured herring, sold whole or as fillets in brine, not the fresh fish or the sweet-pickled jars sold as "herring in wine sauce." Soaking overnight in milk draws out salt and softens the flesh; drain, pat dry, and check a scrap for saltiness before mixing. If you can only find pickled herring in vinegar, rinse it and cut back the pickles and capers.
- Duplicate lineThe herring line appears twice in the printed text, a typesetting slip. The recipe calls for two herrings in total.
- Celery rootCeleriac. Peel it thickly, boil in salted water until a knife slides in easily, roughly 20-25 minutes for a cut-up root, then cool before dicing. It should not be mushy.
- Beets lastBoiled beets will bleed through mayonnaise and turn the whole bowl pink within minutes. Dice them, toss separately with a little of the dressing, and fold them in just before serving if you want the salad to look composed rather than uniformly rose-coloured.
- TongueCooked beef tongue, sold ready-boiled at some delis; ham or a good cooked sausage stands in acceptably. Half a pound is about one cup diced, as the original notes.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, about a teaspoon. It seasons without leaving raw onion pieces in the mix.
- ApplesChop them last and toss with a little lemon juice, or they will brown before the salad reaches the table. A firm tart variety holds its shape.
- Dressing and yieldFigure roughly a cup of mayonnaise to bind, plus more for masking the top. As written this makes a large platter — eight to ten servings as a first course or lunch dish. Chill an hour before serving so the flavours settle.
- KeepingWith chicken, tongue and mayonnaise in it, this is a same-day dish. Refrigerate it and do not leave it out on a buffet for more than two hours.
Salads of this kind — cooked root vegetables, cured fish, cold meat and apple, all cut to a fine dice and bound with mayonnaise — were made across Europe under a shifting set of national labels; German cookery calls the beet-and-herring version Heringssalat, and "Italian salad" turns up in English and American books of the period as a name for composed, mayonnaise-bound salads. The name in this book tells you less about Italy than about the era's habit of using foreign adjectives to signal that a dish was arranged rather than merely tossed. The attribution to Miss Cohen, and the salt herring, beets, apple and tongue, may point to a Central or Eastern European Jewish household contributing a family recipe — the sort of borrowing found in American community and charity cookbooks assembled from named subscribers around the turn of the twentieth century.