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To Boil Vegetables Green
Let asparagus, peas and string beans lie in cold water an hour or two before cooking, then put them into water that is already boiling, but just before putting them in, drop a little bi-carbonate of soda into it. A pinch of carbonate of ammonia does as well. Too much of either makes the vegetables soft and yellow.
The French green peas-petits pois-are better than ours, chiefly because they are gathered while young enough, so, likewise, are the English, but American peas never are-except in California.
The French petits pois are made so green by the addition of a small quantity of Vichy salt to the water they are canned in, an alkaline salt from the famous springs. Bi-carbonate of soda with salt has about the same effect. Spinach, summer cabbage, Brussels sprouts and the like are kept green while boiling by the same treatment as asparagus and peas. Green celery leaves-useful in salad making-need no alkali to green them, the boiling water is sufficient.
When using the coarser outside stalks of celery for any purpose that requires them to be cooked scrape the tough sinews from the back-much as you would scale a fish-and the celery will be greatly improved. "He liveth well who loveth well All things both great and small."--Ancient Mariner. " `Are you a favorer of the olive?' said Lord G-. 'No,' said I, 'I love it not; it hath an under taste of sourness and an upper of oil, that do not make harmony to my palate.'"--Bulwer.
In the salade jardiniere, and the two next to come, you can put away that bottle of queen olives-in the jardiniere as a border ornament instead of jelly, and in the others as part of their composition, and be done with the perplexity. For it is perplexing, seeing the queen olive's visits to the kitchen are so few and far between, to have somebody set the bottle on the table in a perfectly matter-of-course way saying, "As we want this to be a very nice affair you can have some olives for your salad," and then walk off. Now what are you to do with queen olives to be fine for all they are worth? You have heard of a gentleman who is at all the outside parties and festivals where you have to send your contributions of boned turkeys and roast hams and things, who is a terror because he is a critic, and who always at those places makes the people a salad with olives. And it is the olive part that gives the impression of style, wherefore you likewise must do something great, and there's your bottle of olives.
Now you wish your people were Italians, to eat their olives plain, like these in Lothair: "On this morn, this violent morn, a few fisherman in one of the country boats happened to come in, about to dry a net upon a sunny bank. Lothair admired the trim of the vessel, and got talking with the men as they ate their bread and olives, and a small fish or two."
Or like these in Lord Brackenbury: "So La Giulietta hurries in to spread the table; and presently they are all sitting together at their evening meal-a meal literally of Attic simplicity, consisting of bread, salad, salted olives, a kind of sweet cake made with chestnut flour, and a measure of country wine in a wicker flask.' Or like these in Don Quixote: "They were all good-looking young fellows; each had his wallet, which, as it soon appeared, was well stored, at least with relishing incentives to thirst, and such as provoke it at two leagues distance.
They laid themselves along on the ground and, making the grass their table-cloth, there was presently a comfortable display of bread, salt, nuts, and cheese, with some bacon bones, which, though they would not bear picking, were to be sucked with advantage. Caviare too was produced-a kind of black eatable, made of the roes of fish: a notable awakener of thirst. Even olives were not wanting, and though somewhat dry, they were savory and in good keeping. But the glory of the feast was six bottles of wine." An English authority, too, advising on the make-up of a supper, says it will be as well to provide a few olives for the gentlemen; but means them plain, in pickle dishes.
In a little menu of an ancient dinner of Washington's, recently discovered among the family relics, that was printed in the Reporter, olives plain appears twice. However, our gentleman makes salads with olives in. Salade de Legumes, a l'Italienne.
A match to the jardiniere salad, and, like it, made of several varieties of vegetables cut in forms. No mayonaise needed unless for ornamental piping, like icing patterns on a cake. The distinctive feature is the border-mould of vegetable patterns and mosaics set in jelly; in the hollow center the plainer colored vegetables being piled, seasoned only with oil, salt, pepper, and tarragon vinegar. As the large moulds are almost useless for individual service, and even at parties are seldom if ever cut, the writer uses individual border moulds, which any tinner can make. They are of size and shape to fit the small dishes, from 2 1/2 to 3 inches long, and form a trench or border an inch deep, the jelly, etc., moulded therein forming a rim for the dish, the centre being vacant. 1. Take a scollop scoop-not too small and tedious-one that scoops a sort of oblong shell shape or berry out of vegetables-and scoop about a cupful of potatoes raw, and then cook them in salted water. Also a cupful of cooked beets, same shape, and perhaps other vegetables, and a like quantity of shapes of white of eggs. Prepare likewise some cooked string beans by cutting them of same length, and stone a bottle of olives.
Set the small border moulds in a pan that is set in another pan of ice, water, and salt. Drop 3 or 4 olives in each and fill in between with the mixed colored shapes of vegetables and white of eggs, and fill up with amber aspic jelly.
While the borders are setting prepare the inside filling. Choose cauliflower, potatoes, asparagus, beets, and green peas; cook them, divide the cauliflower into small flowerets, cut the potatoes and beets in very small dice, use only the green heads of the asparagus, season them all with tarragon vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. Turn the jelly borders out of their moulds and pile the other mixture in the middle. 2. Another way without border moulds is to spread the mixed shapes of vegetables and egg white over a large platter, pour on jelly to cover them, and, when set, with a sharp knife cut across in diamonds, and then divide these across forming triangles, carefully without dragging and displacing the vegetables. Take up these triangles with sugar tongs and dipping one edge in melted jelly set them up around the dish, and fill the centre as in the other. The olives may be used mixed in the centre filling, or as ornaments, alternating with the jelly shapes.
Huge salads of this kind are made for banquets and ball suppers, sometimes in pyramidal form, the sides of the moulds elaborately decorated with patterns of white of eggs (that has been steamed in a mass shallow in a pan, for large leaves, etc, to be stamped out), and asparagus set up in jelly in full length, with white and red roses of turnips and beets. These are ornamental pieces and for nothing else.
The honeycombed vegetables left after cutting or scooping can be steamed and mashed, the beets can often be chopped and used in another salad. There are knives of peculiar shape sold for stoning olives. It makes a difference if the olives be the large kind and not such as now sometimes come in kegs.
Salade a la Russe.
Various mixtures of fish and vegetables, with olives, pickles, capers and the like are called Russian salad, the distinguishing feature, however, is the Russian salad dressing of highly seasoned jelly whipped to a froth. The gelatine manufacturers have caused to be pretty well known certain sweet trifles made by whipping lemon jelly while cooling on ice to a froth resembling white of eggs, and then called lemon snow, snow pudding, and the like. These are known as Russian jelly or jelly a la Russe in French cookery. The Russian salad jelly is the same thing with salad seasonings instead of sweets. It may be either white, red, green or yellow; and when ornamental border moulds are made with it the variations are to get red fleshed fishes such as lobsters, shrimps and salmon to show in the white jelly, and white fish and sometimes chicken, scalded oysters and the like, to show in colored jelly. Olives, capers, green gherkins and pickled peppers are always in place in Russian salads, and caviare is good for their ornamentation. The inside of the border shapes may be filled with any mixture of vegetables, like the Italian vegetable salad, and mayonaise poured over.
Where so much depends upon individual taste it seems useless to give minute directions.
To make the jelly melt a pint of good firm aspic jelly, then whip it with an egg beater, in a pan of ice water, adding at the same time a quarter pint of olive oil and a little less of mixed vinegars-chili and tarragon-or lemon juice and some plain vinegar. To make the jelly very white whip one or two whites of eggs to a froth and stir them in just as it begins to be too firm to beat.
The red fishes should be cut in pieces of even size, mixed in the jelly, together with the olives, capers and shapes of pickles, and the moulds immediately filled. A good effect may be produced by dropping into the white jelly little cubes of clear jelly of different colors. To color this whipped jelly red use beet vinegar, or lobster spawn pounded and rubbed through a fine seive. For yellow mix mayonaise dressing in it instead of oil and vinegar. For green use the juice pressed out of pounded raw spinach leaves, or of cooked celery leaves.
Stone the olives and fill them with chopped mixed pickles before putting them in the salad.
If the lobster holds the most prominent place among salads we guess it must be because the Old-World cooks, purveyors, major-domos and kings' tasters have thrust it forward for its bright color to make their set tables look like pictures. Looking back through an American cooking experience of about thirty years the writer has never had reason to regard it as particularly delicious eating. Conspicuous in the foreign menu certainly, but who can call to mind where any writer has eulogized lobster salad or held up the lobster for anything but a comparison for somebody's red face? Somewhere Thackeray who mentions everything eatable, and each at its proper style of table, and who knew what was good, mentions lobster and lobster salad, but in both places they are in the hands of low-down persons; one of them in a dusty place at a fair.