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The Cardinal's Salad
Wash a good lettuce and a bunch of water-cress. Cut a cold boiled beef into strips, add six radishes, two hard-boiled eggs chopped up, and one small sliced cucumber. Arrange the lettuce-leaves in a salad-bowl, mix the other ingredients with a sufficient quantity of mayonnaise sauce, put them in the midst of the lettuce, and serve.
A composed salad of the kind that used up Sunday's boiled meat. Nothing here is difficult, but two things in the text need decoding before you shop.
- "A cold boiled beef"Most likely leftover lesso or bollito — the piece of beef simmered for broth, then sliced cold. The singular phrasing is loose, but beef is what the text says. Around 8 oz of cold braised or simmered beef, cut into pencil-width strips, is a reasonable working amount.
- Quantities and yieldThe lettuce, cress and mayonnaise are given only loosely ("a good lettuce," "a bunch," "a sufficient quantity"). One large head of lettuce, a generous handful of watercress and about half a cup of mayonnaise should serve four as a first course or light lunch.
- The mayonnaiseThis book assumes mayonnaise made at home with raw yolk and oil. Bought mayonnaise works and is pasteurised; if you make your own, use very fresh eggs and keep the salad cold and eat it the same day.
- Dress at the last momentMayonnaise draws water out of cucumber and radish as the salad stands, and the sauce slackens. Combine beef, egg, cucumber and radish with the sauce shortly before it goes into the lettuce.
- CucumberOlder cucumber varieties were generally thicker-skinned and seedier than modern greenhouse ones. Peel and seed the small cucumber the recipe calls for; a ridge or Persian cucumber can go in unpeeled.
- WatercressPick the cress over and discard thick stems and yellowed leaves, and dry it thoroughly — wet leaves are what makes a mayonnaise-bound salad slump.
- Building the bowlThe text has the leaves arranged in the bowl with the dressed mixture set in their midst, which reads as lining the bowl rather than tearing the lettuce into a bed. The firmer outer leaves line best.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was written by Antonia Isola — the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis — to put plain Italian household cooking into the hands of American readers. Boiled beef was the inevitable by-product of making brodo, and Italian home cooking has a long repertoire of cold salads for using it up. Names invoking a cardinal are often said to be attached to red dishes, after the scarlet of a cardinal's robes, though that is a traditional convention rather than a documented origin for this dish. Composed salads bound with mayonnaise rather than dressed at table were fashionable in this period on both sides of the Atlantic.