Home › Recipes › Salade Jardiniere
Salade Jardiniere
With peas, asparagus points and other green vegetables really green, beets blood red, and first-rate aspic jelly for border, and flowers, nothing goes to table that is more showy than this.
Cut a number of different colored root vegetables in slices and boil them till done in salted water-a white turnip, a yellow rutabaga, a red carrot, salsify, parsnip, broad celery stalks, almost anything for variety. When done stamp them all out in little star shapes or flower shapes, with a tin vegetable cutter, not much larger than a silver dime. Also stamp out a quantity of the same star shapes of cooked beets, the deepest red, and keep them ready in vinegar, separate.
Boil a corresponding proportion of asparagus heads green, also some green peas (unless you can get the French peas, and half a can may do), and string beans and chives, etc. A small quantity of the French ognons, or small seed onions sold in bottles, is also a desirable addition. Cut the string beans in diamond shapes.
Mix all these vegetables, except the beets and a sprinkling of the peas or asparagus points, together with enough oil and vinegar to moisten, and turn them from one bowl to another a few times.
Pile in the middle of the dishes, and pour thin mayonaise over, and scatter the star shapes of beets and the green peas all over the top. Around the edge of the dishes place blocks of amber jelly, lettuce leaves, tiny bunches of cress, flowers, etc., all or part, according to fancy. The jelly should be cooled in dishes, in depth about half an inch, cut in perfect cubes, then cut across, to form three-sided blocks. For all these ornamental purposes it is generally necessary to clarify the aspic jelly a second time-it makes it firmer and of a more golden richness of appearance. All things in this class are for style. Good workmanship tells. Better never attempt them at all than make them but tawdry imitations.
A composed salad built for the buffet table rather than the plate, and the whole point is the contrast of colours. Cook each vegetable separately and keep the beets apart until the last moment, or the whole dish turns pink.
- Keep the beets segregatedBeet juice bleeds into everything it touches, which is why the recipe has you hold the beet stars in vinegar on their own and scatter them only at the end. Drain and blot them before they go on top.
- Blanch the greens properly"really green" is the point, so boil in well-salted water only until just tender and cool them quickly; the colour is what the whole dish depends on.
- Root vegetables, cooked then cutBoil the turnip, rutabaga, carrot, salsify and parsnip whole or in thick slabs so they hold together under the cutter, and stop them at just-tender. Anything soft enough to mash will crumble when stamped.
- The cuttersA silver dime is about 18 mm across, so aspic cutters or the smallest set of canapé cutters are the right scale. Cut the slices about 5 mm thick so the shapes stand up.
- Aspic jellyThe "amber jelly" is a clarified meat or poultry stock set with gelatin, not a sweet jelly. Clarifying twice, as directed, gives both firmness and clarity; a modern equivalent is a well-strained consommé set with enough gelatin to cut cleanly, chilled in a half-inch layer and cut into cubes, then diagonally into wedges.
- SalsifyRarely stocked now outside farmers' markets and some Italian and Middle Eastern grocers. It discolours the moment it is peeled, so hold it in acidulated water. Parsnip or celeriac substitutes without loss.
- "French peas" and bottled onionsCanned petits pois, then a luxury import, and small pickled cocktail onions. Both are still sold; frozen petits pois, briefly blanched, hold their colour better than canned.
- Thin mayonnaiseSlacken mayonnaise with a spoonful or two of vinegar, lemon juice or cream so it pours and coats rather than sitting in a mound. If it is stiff it will drag the vegetables out of position.
- Timing and yieldTiming -- everything can be cooked and cut a day ahead and kept covered and chilled; dress and assemble within an hour of serving or the dressing leaches colour. The recipe gives no quantities, so scale the vegetables to the dishes you are filling.
Salade à la jardinière — the gardener's salad — belongs to the nineteenth-century garde-manger, the cold larder department whose job was display: aspic, chaud-froid, moulded creams and the elaborate cold buffet that stood on the sideboard through a long dinner. The name in French cookery generally signals an assortment of vegetables cut to uniform shapes, and stamped stars and diamonds set off with aspic were familiar hotel and catering work in America as well as France. The closing warning — better not to attempt it than to make a tawdry imitation — is the voice of a trade cook talking to other trade cooks.