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Vegetable Salad--Plain
Take equal parts of four, five or six kinds of cooked vegetables--green peas, string beans, cauliflowers, asparagus heads not too soft cooked, corn, Lima beans and potatoes, and a smaller proportion of onions--if small green ones so much the better--and a few slices of beets for ornament. Cut the potatoes in small dice, the string beans and onions to match, and pull the cauliflower apart in small sprigs.
Mix all with a little seasoning of pepper and salt and shake them about in the salad cream in a bowl.
Dish up with cut beets and chopped parsley sprinkeled over the top. Cooks who care to follow the analogist will have observed that hollandaise salad cream is very like the hot hollandaise sauce used so much in the highest style cookery, not only for a fish sauce but equally for asparagus, cauliflower, artichoke, potatoes, etc. The difference is only in the proportions and in this being used cold. Hollandaise or Dutch sauce by the English method is milder, the French more concentrated and pungent. This dressing answers the question of what we shall do when we have no oil, and people I have instruted with pencillings by the way, have generally taken more pleasure in making it than the other more troublesome varieties. Still when we have this and the genuine French mayonaise there remains a want of which we are reminded when people looking over a table unsatisfactorily furnished with lettuce without boiled eggs on top, and over a bill of fare equally incomplete send timidly asking the powers that be if they can't have a hard-boiled egg or two for their salad. Such persons have been known to send written on a bill of fare the lines imputed to Sidney Smith: "True flavor needs it, and your poet begs The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs."
Well, we are coming to that kind of dressing, but having in mind the common aversion to and common scarcity of huile d'olives vierge, will offer for the experiments of the critical in such matters a refinement upon the foregoing hollandaise.
A composed cold vegetable salad in the mold of the French macédoine, bound with the book's own cooked egg-and-butter "hollandaise salad cream" rather than an oil dressing. The recipe assumes you have already made that dressing from an earlier page.
- The dressing is elsewhere"Salad cream" here means the cold hollandaise-style dressing given in the neighboring recipes of this book; the text says only that it differs from hot hollandaise in its proportions and in being served cold, so expect an egg-and-butter base. A good mayonnaise or a thick cooked salad dressing stands in for it directly.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyEach vegetable wants its own pot and its own timing. Peas and beans two to four minutes, cauliflower five, asparagus tips three, potatoes until just tender at the center. Shock everything in ice water so the colors hold and the pieces stay distinct.
- "Not too soft cooked"The phrase is applied to the asparagus heads, but the principle governs the dish. This is a salad of pieces, not a mash. Anything cooked to the point of collapse will break down as soon as it is shaken with the dressing.
- Keep the beets apartBeets are for ornament and should be sliced and added at the last moment, on top. Mixed in, they bleed and turn the whole bowl pink within minutes.
- Onions"Small green ones" are scallions or spring onions; use the white and pale green, sliced thin. The recipe asks only for "a smaller proportion" than the other vegetables — raw onion dominates a cold salad quickly.
- Corn and Lima beansIn the period both were seasonal or came from the can. Frozen corn and frozen limas, cooked briefly and cooled, are closer to the intent than canned, which are already soft.
- Dress cold, serve coldAn egg-based dressing on cooked vegetables is a good medium for bacterial growth. Assemble it chilled, keep it refrigerated, and do not leave it standing on a buffet for hours.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities; as a rough guide, about six cups of prepared vegetables with a cup of dressing will serve eight as a side salad. It is better dressed lightly and tossed just before serving than made up far ahead.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working hotel and restaurant cooks in Chicago, and the digression here is characteristic of him: he teaches by comparison, pointing out that a cold "salad cream" is only hot hollandaise in different proportions. The salad itself belongs to the family of composed vegetable salads the French called macédoine — diced cooked vegetables bound in a dressing — of which the better-known descendant is salade russe. The practical concern driving the whole passage is the scarcity and cost of good olive oil in nineteenth-century American kitchens: virgin oil (huile d'olives vierge) was an imported luxury, so an egg-and-butter dressing solved a real supply problem. The verse about "the pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs" comes from a rhymed salad recipe long attributed to the English clergyman and wit Sydney Smith; Whitehead quotes it as a stock joke about diners who will not accept a salad without egg.