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Sect 1.-Ordinary English Salads
LETTUCE. 709. A bleached lettuce well-washed, and cut up with a few slices of beet-root, is the universal salad in this country; but by some people a few very young onions or chives are added. After being cut up, a mixture variously compounded (see par. 718), is poured over it, and mixed with the salad-spoon and fork.
ENDIVE. 710. Endive is used in the same way as lettuce; as also is mustard and cress, mixed with sliced radish and water-cress.
A description of the plain English salad of the mid-nineteenth century: leaves, beetroot, and a poured dressing given separately elsewhere in the book. The instructions are thin by modern standards, but the assumptions behind them are worth spelling out.
- "Bleached" lettuceThis means a head grown or tied so the inner leaves stay pale and mild, not anything done in the kitchen. A tight cos or butterhead, or the blanched heart of a larger head, gives the same effect.
- The beetroot is cookedVictorian salad beet was generally boiled or baked whole, skinned, and often kept under vinegar before slicing; the entry does not say so, but raw beetroot is unlikely to be what is meant.
- Dry the leavesWhatever the mixture at par. 718 turns out to be, a poured dressing will slide off wet leaves and pool at the bottom of the bowl. Spin or towel the leaves thoroughly after washing.
- Cut up, not tornThe entry says the lettuce is cut up, so a knife is what is envisaged. Tearing gives less bruising on modern soft lettuces, and is worth doing instead if the leaves are delicate.
- Salad-spoon and forkOften wooden or horn, on the usual reasoning that acid should not meet metal, though metal servers were also sold. Any non-reactive utensil serves; toss lightly and only at the moment of serving, since dressed leaves collapse within minutes.
- The dressing is elsewhereThe entry sends you to paragraph 718 for the mixture, which is 'variously compounded'. Without it this entry is only an assembly note, so pair it with a mustard-and-vinegar or egg-based dressing of the same era, or any simple vinaigrette.
- Mustard and cressSeedlings raised in a box or pot and cut young, and still sold as cress or micro-mustard. Ordinary salad cress is the closest substitute; watercress is a different, peppery plant and is listed separately in the original.
- QuantityOne good head of lettuce with a small beetroot dresses a salad for four as a side dish.
The plainness here is the point. Nineteenth-century English salad-making had a reputation on the Continent for consisting of leaves, beetroot and whatever was poured over them, and this entry, opening a section frankly headed "Ordinary English Salads", does not argue otherwise. Beetroot's place in it may owe something to colour on a table otherwise all green and pale, and something to the fact that it kept well in vinegar through the months when salad greens did not. The careful note that dressings are "variously compounded" and treated in a separate paragraph is telling: the leaves were assumed, the sauce was the matter of taste and debate. Chives and young onions appear as an optional touch rather than a given.