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Little Towers of Salad
Put a couple of eggs on to boil hard, while you make a thick mayonnaise sauce. Cut some beetroot, some cucumber, some cold potato, some tomato into slices. Peel your eggs, and slice them, and build up little piles of the different things, till about two inches high. Between each slice you will sprinkle grated breadcrumbs, pepper, salt, a tiny scrap of chopped raw shallot, parsley, all mixed in a cup. Finish with the rounded ends of white of egg on the top, put lettuce round and pour the dressing over it.
A composed salad built as free-standing stacks, which means the whole dish turns on two things: dry vegetables and a mayonnaise stiff enough to hold. Everything else is knife work.
- The hinge: a stiff mayonnaiseThe hinge: a thick mayonnaise -- "Thick" here means thick enough to cling to a two-inch tower rather than run straight off, though the recipe still expects it to be poured over. Work the oil in slowly; if it slackens, beat in another yolk rather than thinning it with vinegar.
- Blot everythingSliced tomato and cucumber will weep and collapse the piles. Salt the slices briefly, then pat them dry on a cloth before building, and drain the beetroot well so it does not bleed into the mayonnaise.
- Beetroot and potatoThe potato is specified as cold and cooked; the beetroot is presumably cooked and cold too, though the recipe does not say so. Boil beets whole until tender (40-60 minutes depending on size), and use a waxy potato so the slices hold their shape.
- Hard-boiled eggsTen minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey ring. Slice with a wet knife or an egg slicer so the rounds stay whole; the "rounded ends of white" are the two dome-shaped end slices, saved to cap each tower.
- Grated breadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread grated on a box grater, not soft fresh crumbs and not packaged dried crumbs, which are too coarse and sandy. Their job is to absorb vegetable liquid between the layers.
- Raw shallot"A tiny scrap" is meant literally, perhaps a teaspoon of very finely chopped shallot for the whole seasoning cup, mixed with the crumbs, parsley, pepper and salt in advance so it distributes evenly.
- Building and holdingAlternate the slices for colour, press each layer lightly, and use the widest slices at the base. Assembled towers keep an hour or so in the refrigerator; dress them only at the moment of serving.
- YieldThe vegetable quantities are unspecified, but two eggs give four rounded ends of white for capping, which suggests about four towers.
- Raw egg in the dressingUncooked mayonnaise carries the usual risk from raw yolk. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it is best read as a record of a displaced cuisine written down by the households that took those cooks in. Composed salads of this kind, cold cooked beetroot and potato layered with egg and bound with a hand-made mayonnaise, are often said to have been familiar on Belgian and northern French tables, where the salad was treated as a constructed dish rather than a tossed bowl. The presentation, small architectural piles ringed with lettuce and masked with sauce, is generally associated with the same taste for composed dishes that produced moulded aspics and "salade russe", scaled down to what a domestic kitchen could manage with leftovers and two eggs.