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Russian Salad (Mix one cup each cold cooked)
Mix one cup each cold cooked carrot cubes and potato cubes, one cup cold cooked peas, and one cup cold cooked beans, and marinate with French Dressing. Arrange on lettuce leaves in four sections, and cover each section with Mayonnaise Dressing. Garnish two sections with small pieces of smoked salmon, one section with finely chopped whites of "hard boiled" eggs, and one section with yolks of "hard-boiled" eggs forced through a strainer, Put small sprigs of parsley or shrimps in lines dividing sections.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the vegetables are dressed and chilled, then the platter is built in quarters and garnished. The order of operations is the whole recipe.
- Marinate first, mayonnaise lastThe vegetables are dressed with French dressing before the mayonnaise goes on. Let excess dressing drain off, or the mayonnaise slides and the sections bleed into one another.
- Which beansThe recipe does not say which. Green beans cut in half-inch lengths match the scale of the diced carrot and potato; if you use shell beans, drain them very dry.
- Cut the cubes small and evenQuarter-inch dice for both carrot and potato. Cook them separately, the potato just until a knife enters without resistance, so it holds its edges instead of breaking down into the dressing.
- French Dressing, 1896 styleFrench Dressing -- In this book that means oil and vinegar (roughly two parts oil to one of vinegar) with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, not an emulsified bottled vinaigrette. Mayonnaise Dressing is the book's own egg-yolk-and-oil mayonnaise.
- The strainer trickPushing hard-cooked yolks through a fine sieve, as directed, gives a fluffy texture. A rasp grater does the same thing faster. Keep whites and yolks strictly separate for the visual contrast.
- Smoked salmonCold-smoked salmon, sliced thin and cut into short ribbons, suits the dish, though the recipe only says "smoked salmon." Add it just before serving, as the oil in the dressing will slacken and dull it if it sits.
- Shrimp garnishSmall cooked and peeled shrimp, laid nose to tail along the dividing lines. Modern 70-90 count shrimp are the right size; larger ones look clumsy against quarter-inch dice.
- YieldAbout four cups of dressed vegetables, which serves four to six as a first course or a lunch salad. Build it on a flat platter rather than in a bowl, or the quartering is lost.
Russian salad, or salade russe, reached American cookbooks by way of French professional kitchens, where it was a standard cold-buffet item built on diced root vegetables bound with mayonnaise. Its ancestor is generally traced to the salad made in Moscow in the 1860s at the Hermitage restaurant by a chef named Olivier, though the elaborate original bore little resemblance to the vegetable-and-mayonnaise version that spread through Europe under the Russian name. What Fannie Farmer offers here is the late-Victorian party form of it: not a mixed bowl but a decorated platter, sectioned and garnished in contrasting colors, in the same spirit as the molded and piped dishes that fill the salad chapters of the period. Smoked salmon and shrimp mark it as company food, and the sieved egg yolk is a garnish common in nineteenth-century service.