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Beet and Potato Salad
Cut some cooked blood beets with your sabatier scollop knife into cubes or dice shapes with flu ed sides, and keep the cut shapes in vinegar. Prepare some Parisienne potatoes--there should be about a quart of each--and the allemande salad dressing. Pile a few of the beet shapes in the middle of the dishes, place the potatoes around as a border, and with a tablespoon pour the sauce over the potatoes, leaving the beets of their natural color. Ornament with a hasty sprig of parsley to each dish. "Characterless people who are like sasify that is always just going to taste like an oyster and never does."--Talmage. ("Was often thought but ne'er so well expressed." Mem. To give salsify a chance in allemande dressing.)
A late-nineteenth-century plated salad that depends entirely on keeping two colors apart. Nothing here is difficult; the vocabulary is the obstacle.
- Keep the beets undressedThe whole point of the arrangement is contrast: the potatoes are sauced, the beets are not. Dress the potatoes in a bowl and spoon them around the beets, or the red will bleed through the pale dressing within a minute.
- "Sabatier scollop knife"A fluted or crinkle cutter — Sabatier was simply the maker. A modern crinkle-cut knife, mandoline wavy blade, or the fluted side of a garnish cutter gives the same ridged faces.
- Blood beetsPeriod name for ordinary deep-red beetroot; "blood turnip" types appear in seed lists of the day. Boil or roast them whole and unpeeled, 40–60 minutes depending on size, so the color stays in the beet.
- Parisienne potatoesBalls cut from raw peeled potatoes with a parisienne scoop (melon baller), then simmered in salted water until just tender, about 8–10 minutes. Cook them past that and they lose their shape when tossed in dressing.
- Allemande salad dressingNamed after the French sauce allemande, i.e. thickened with egg yolk; the book appears to give the recipe elsewhere, since it is referred to here as a known preparation. Any thick, pale, well-seasoned mayonnaise-type dressing serves the same purpose here.
- Quantities and yield"About a quart of each" is a batch quantity meant for several individual dishes at once rather than a single serving. Scale it down for a household table.
- The vinegar holding stepCut beets sit in plain vinegar until service. This keeps the color bright and seasons them, but drain them well on a cloth before plating or the vinegar will thin the dressing.
- The salsify asideThe closing note is a joke, not an instruction. If you want to follow the suggestion, salsify (oyster plant) needs peeling into acidulated water and simmering 15–20 minutes before it can be dressed.
This is garde-manger work from the era of the big American hotel kitchen, when a salad was judged as much by its arrangement on the plate as by its flavor — hence the fluted cutter, the scooped potato balls, and the sprig of parsley on every dish. The dressing name points to the French kitchen hierarchy these American manuals borrowed wholesale: "allemande" in professional usage marked a sauce enriched and thickened with egg yolk, and salad dressings of the period took the same label. The quotation is from T. DeWitt Talmage, the Brooklyn preacher whose sermons were syndicated in newspapers across the country and whose lines were quoted the way advertising slogans later would be; the compiler's bracketed reply is the sort of shop-floor commentary that gives these trade cookbooks their voice. Salsify, the butt of the joke, was a common winter root then and was widely called oyster plant for a faint resemblance in flavor that, as Talmage suggests, rarely arrived.