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Spanish Salad
In the centre of a flat serving-dish arrange a mound of endive. Peel tomatoes, divide into sections or cut in slices, and arrange these around the endive. Shell cold, hard-boiled eggs; cut in halves, crosswise, and in points; remove the yolks and pound to a paste with an equal amount of the flesh of lobster, shrimp, anchovies or salmon.
With this paste, seasoned to taste with oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, fill the cups fashioned from the whites of the eggs, and arrange them around the tomatoes. Strew chopped shallot and sweet pepper over the endive. Mix equal portions of oil and vinegar, add salt and pepper to taste, and pour over the salad. Serve at once.
A composed platter salad rather than a tossed one, and it stands or falls on the arrangement. Everything can be prepared ahead and assembled at the last minute, but the dressing goes on only as it goes to table.
- Which endiveIn American books of this period "endive" usually means the frilly curly endive (frisée) or the broader escarole, not the pale Belgian chicory sold under that name today. Either reading works, though the mound in the centre implies a leafy head rather than tight torpedoes.
- Cut in halves, crosswise, and in pointsMost likely a vandyked cut: the egg halved across the middle with a zigzag of shallow angled cuts rather than a straight slice, so the two halves separate into notched cups. The recipe does not name the cut, and "in points" could also be read as trimming the halves to points. If you take the vandyke reading, use a small paring knife and go to the centre on each cut before pulling the halves apart.
- The filling ratioAn equal amount of cooked yolk and pounded shellfish or fish; the original does not say whether by weight or bulk. Anchovies are far saltier than lobster or salmon, so season at the end and taste before adding any salt at all if anchovy is your choice. A food processor does in seconds what the mortar was for.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore the base, thirty seconds in boiling water, then into cold water and the skin slips off. Worth doing: unpeeled skins curl away from the dressing and spoil the look of a dish that is mostly about looks.
- The dressing is sharper than modern tasteEqual oil and vinegar is a one-to-one vinaigrette, where current practice runs three or four parts oil to one of vinegar. Mix a little and taste it against the salad before committing; a milder wine vinegar helps if you want to keep the period proportion.
- Shallot and sweet pepper"Sweet pepper" here is a fresh green or red bell pepper, chopped fine, not a spice. Chop the shallot finely and let it sit a few minutes in the vinegar before mixing the dressing to take the raw edge off.
- Serve at once means itDressed endive wilts quickly and the tomatoes weep. Build the platter, keep the dressing in a jug, and pour it over at the table.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Figuring one tomato and one egg per person, this scales cleanly; four eggs, four tomatoes and a head of endive make a first course for four.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the moment around 1900 when the salad stopped being a bowl of dressed greens and became a piece of tableside architecture. Composed salads of this kind, arranged in concentric rings on a flat dish and dressed only at the last second, owed a good deal to French restaurant practice, and the national labels attached to them — Spanish, Italian, Russian — were loose signals of flavour rather than provenance. Here "Spanish" seems to rest on the tomatoes, the sweet pepper and the shallot; the stuffed eggs pounded with lobster or anchovy have the look of professional garde-manger work of the period. Hill edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and a dish like this one, entirely cold and assembled from prepared components, would have suited a household entertaining at luncheon without much kitchen help.