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Hamburg Salad
2 large boiled potatoes cut in dice. 1 cupful of celery, same way. 1/2 cupful each of smoked halibut, dried beef and red smoked tongue all cut small. 1 small onion. 2 cloves of garlic finely minced. 1 or 2 red peppers out of the pickle jar. 6 hard-boiled eggs.
The dried beef and tongue should be first cooked by boiling several hours. The celery is better if blanched (parboiled.) Mix all, except the eggs, in a bowl and shake about with oil poured in till the mixture looks rich and glossy, then add a cupful of vinegar. Ornament with the yolks of eggs chopped fine and the whites cut in strips.
A German Salad--Herring Salad. 1 or 2 large smoked herrings. 1 cupful of pickled red cabbage, chopped small. 1 cupful of slices of salsify or oyster plant--cooked. 1 cupful of chopped white cabbage. Pepper, salt, oil, vinegar.
Free the meat of the herrings from bones and skin and mince it as nearly in dice shape as may be. The salsify may be substituted with potatoes if necessary, cut in dice or lozenge shapes. Mix all with oil, vinegar, pepper and salt.
While we are yet exploring for strong and pungent ingredients with which perhaps some knowing one might "unwonted richness to the salad give," it may be noticed that the repertory of the salad-making D'Albignac of Limousin included both caviare and truffles. People who enjoy anchovy toast; which is toast spread with anchovy paste or anchovy butter, or canapes aux anchois; pieces of toast with filleted anchovies, will doubtless like canapes au caviare. These are all good salad accompaniments, and as anchovies are commonly used in salads there is no good reason why caviare might not, but it is more likely it was used only in the way of decoration. As to what caviare is--and it used to be termed Russian caviare as if it had been of Russian invention--the Scientific American gives this information: "Hyde Park, some eighty-three miles up the Hudson River from New York, is one of the principal fishing stations for sturgeon, whose roe, when properly prepared, is known as caviare, a food preparation greatly enjoyed by our German and French citizens, not to forget the Russians, to whom we export large quantities every year. The roe weighs about one-third as much as the fish. A fifty pound roe is considered a large roe, thirty pounds being the average. As soon as the sturgeons reach shore they are opened and the roes taken out. Masses of roe are rubbed through wire seives. The eggs are then salted for a short time, after which they are laid on hair seives to drain off. When thoroughly drained what was but a short time ago only halibut spawn, is now the toothsome caviare of which thousands of pounds are annually spread on bread and eaten with much relish."
Caviare, like every other eatable thing, can now be bought in cans. It is black nearly as truffles. Softened with a little warm butter it can be used with good effect to ornament dishes of fish salads in piping and leaf patterns. In the times when fashionable ladies used to decorate their faces with huge patches of fancy patterns stamped out of court plaster, and white, and yellow dishes on the table had the same done for them with truffle slices, it is very likely a similar service was required for fish en mayonaise, of the high-flavored caviare.
Two cold German-style delicatessen salads, followed by the author's digression on caviare. The recipes themselves are assembly work; the difficulty is that half the ingredients were bought at a German grocery in 1890 and are now specialty items.
- The dressing is the hingeEverything here is already salty, smoked or pickled, so the oil goes in first and generously — "till the mixture looks rich and glossy" is the only guide given, and it is a good one. Add the vinegar last and in stages; the full cupful will overwhelm a bowl this size unless you are working with a large quantity, and no salt should be added until you have tasted.
- Dried beefThis is the salt-cured, air-dried beef sold now as chipped or dried beef, usually in paper-thin slices or a jar. The instruction to boil it several hours applies to a whole cured piece; sliced supermarket dried beef needs only a brief soak or blanch in hot water to pull the salt down.
- Red smoked tongueSmoked, brine-cured beef tongue, red from the curing salts. Sold cooked at some delicatessens; if raw and cured, it does need long simmering, after which the skin peels off while warm. Pastrami or a good smoked ham cut in small dice stands in without embarrassment.
- Smoked halibutOnce common in East Coast markets, now hard to find. Hot-smoked halibut or sablefish is the closest thing; smoked whitefish is a workable substitute.
- "Red peppers out of the pickle jar"Small red peppers of the sort pickled in the mixed-pickle jars of the period; the recipe does not say whether sweet or hot. Jarred pickled cherry peppers or piquillo peppers give the sweet-sour red note. One or two, sliced fine.
- Blanching the celeryParboiling celery for a minute or two takes the raw edge off and softens the strings. With modern celery hearts it is optional; if you skip it, cut the dice smaller.
- Salsify in the herring saladOyster plant, boiled until tender and sliced. It oxidises brown the moment it is peeled, so hold it in acidulated water. The recipe already offers diced potato as the substitute.
- Yield and servingThe Hamburg salad makes roughly six to eight servings as an appetizer course. Both are better made an hour or two ahead and served cold, with rye bread; the egg garnish goes on at the last moment so the yolks stay bright.
- On the caviare passageThe quoted article's closing line calls sturgeon roe "halibut spawn", which is plainly an error, whether in the source or in Whitehead's transcription of it. Wild Atlantic and Hudson River sturgeon are now protected and their roe cannot be bought; farmed sturgeon, paddlefish and hackleback roe are the legal substitutes.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the hotel and restaurant trade of the American Midwest, and these two salads belong to the German delicatessen tradition that supplied it. The Hamburg salad belongs to the family of northern German Fleischsalat and Heringssalat, built on cured fish and meat, root vegetables, pickles and a sharp oil-and-vinegar dressing, and eaten cold with bread rather than as a leaf salad. The D'Albignac mentioned in the closing digression is the emigre French nobleman who, according to Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du Gout, made a fortune dressing salads in London after the Revolution; he afterwards settled in Limousin, which is how Whitehead identifies him. The caviare passage is a useful reminder that sturgeon roe was then an American product, exported to Russia according to the article quoted, and that Whitehead himself thought it "more likely it was used only in the way of decoration".