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Belgian Salad
is merely endive, washed and torn apart with red peppers added here and there as well as the ordinary salad dressing. Belgian asparagus is done by adding to the cooked vegetable a bechamel sauce, poured over the dish, and then slices of hard boiled eggs placed on the top. The giant asparagus is used, and it is eaten with a fork.
Two Belgian sides sketched in a few lines, in the telegraphic style of a book compiled from dictation. The gaps are worth filling before you cook.
- "Endive" means witloof"Endive" is ambiguous -- In a Belgian context this could be the pale, tight, blanched chicory head sold as Belgian endive, witloof or chicon; but the book was compiled in England, where the period usage was generally to call that vegetable chicory and to reserve "endive" for the curly sort, and the instruction to tear the leaves apart suits a curly head. If you use witloof, allow one to two heads per person and core the bitter base out with a small V-cut before separating the leaves.
- The red peppers are ambiguousThe original does not say whether these are sweet pimiento strips or something hot. Sweet red pepper, raw or from a jar of pimiento, suits the endive better; a hot pepper would flatten it.
- "Ordinary salad dressing"Most likely a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, often with a little mustard, though the phrase could also cover a boiled dressing or mayonnaise. Dress endive at the last moment — the leaves weep and go limp fast.
- Bechamel proportionsNone are given. A workable sauce for four is 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk, cooked out for a few minutes so it does not taste of raw flour, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. It should coat, not set.
- "Giant asparagus" is white asparagus"Giant asparagus" is most likely white asparagus -- Thick blanched spears, grown under soil. They must be peeled from just below the tip down, and they take longer than green asparagus — about 12 to 18 minutes in salted water depending on thickness, until a knife slides into the butt end. Green asparagus substituted here needs far less time and no peeling.
- Assembly and timingDrain the spears well and let them steam dry a moment; water under a bechamel thins it into a puddle. Sauce, then the sliced hard-boiled egg on top, and serve at once while warm.
- Why a forkThe note that it is eaten with a fork is a table instruction, not a cooking one — asparagus was widely eaten with the fingers at the time, which sauce makes impractical.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; the amounts suggested in these notes serve four as a first course or side.
The Belgian Cook Book was put together in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, which explains the compressed, spoken quality of entries like this one: someone described a dish from memory and it was written down as described. Both vegetables here were national points of pride. Blanched chicory is generally traced to the area around Brussels in the middle of the nineteenth century, where roots stored in the dark were found to throw pale, mild heads, and it was exported as "Belgian endive" — the name it still carries abroad. White asparagus is associated above all with Mechelen and the sandy soils of the Flemish market gardens, and the pairing with butter or a light white sauce and chopped hard-boiled egg is the ancestor of the dish still sold as asperges op Vlaamse wijze, asparagus in the Flemish manner.