Italian Salad
Cut one carrot and one turnip into slices, and cook them in boiling soup. When cold, mix them with two cold boiled potatoes and one beet cut into strips. Add a very little chopped leeks or onion, pour some sauce, "Lombarda", over the salad, and garnish with water-cress. "Alla Pollastra" Salad Chop up six lettuce-leaves and three stalks of celery, cut up the remains of a cold fowl in small pieces, and mix with one tablespoon of vinegar and salt and pepper in a salad bowl. Pour a cup of mayonnaise sauce over, and garnish with quarters of hard-boiled egg, one tablespoon of capers, six stoned olives, and some small, tender lettuce-leaves. "Alla Macedoine" Salad Cut into small pieces one cold boiled beet and half an onion. Add some cold boiled string-beans, some cold boiled asparagus tips, two tablespoons of cold cooked peas, one cold boiled carrot, and some celery. Mix them together, and pour over all a mayonnaise sauce. Add the juice of a lemon and serve.
Three separate salads run together on one page, all of them built from cold cooked vegetables and a made sauce. They assume a kitchen with yesterday's broth, yesterday's roast fowl and a bowl of hand-beaten mayonnaise already on hand.
- Three recipes, not oneThe page holds an Italian Salad, an "Alla Pollastra" (chicken) salad and an "Alla Macedoine" salad. No yields are given; the quantities suggest a small dish for perhaps two to four.
- "Cook them in boiling soup"This means simmering the carrot and turnip slices in broth rather than water, so they carry flavour into the finished salad. Any light stock works; 8-12 minutes for sliced roots, until just tender, then drain and cool.
- Sauce "Lombarda"Apparently a cross-reference to another recipe elsewhere in the same book, not something you can buy. If you do not have it, dress the salad with a sharp oil-and-vinegar dressing; the vegetables want acidity, not more richness.
- "The remains of a cold fowl"About 2 cups of picked cooked chicken, dark and light meat together. A rotisserie bird gives roughly this from half the carcass.
- MayonnaiseTraditional mayonnaise here is raw-yolk, whisked to order. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurised egg, is the practical substitute and holds better on a buffet table; if you make it fresh, use pasteurised eggs and serve the salad cold and promptly.
- Keep the beet apartBoth the first and third salads use cold boiled beet. Dress it separately and add it at the last moment, or the whole bowl turns magenta within a few minutes.
- "Alla Macedoine"A macédoine is simply a mixture of vegetables cut to a uniform small dice. Cut everything to roughly the same size and the salad reads as intended; ragged pieces make it look like leftovers, which of course it is.
- Lemon at the endThe lemon juice goes in after the mayonnaise, which loosens and brightens it. Add it a little at a time and taste, since a whole lemon can thin a cup of mayonnaise into a sauce.
- Salting cooked vegetablesBoiled potatoes, beans and asparagus absorb seasoning poorly once cold. Salt them while still warm, before they go into the bowl.
These salads come from Simple Italian Cookery, published in 1912 under the pen name Antonia Isola by Mabel Earl McGinnis, an American who had lived in Italy and set out to explain everyday Italian home cooking to English-speaking readers well before Italian food had any real foothold in the United States outside immigrant neighbourhoods. The composed cold vegetable salad she describes is a thrift dish: leftover boiled roots, the tail end of a roast bird, a spoonful of yesterday's peas, all bound with a sauce and made presentable with capers, olives and hard-boiled egg. The names carry their own history — pollastra is a young hen, and macédoine is French kitchen vocabulary that had already spread across European cookbooks, generally traced to the idea of Macedonia as a mixture of peoples, hence a mixture of diced things. That a book of "simple Italian cookery" reaches for a French term and a French sauce says a good deal about how professional cooking was taught in the period.