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Anchovy Salad
Fillet some anchovies and shred them lengthwise. Arrange them tastefully upon a small plate and garnish with groups of chopped hard eggs, chopped parsley and onions, ornamented with whole capers. Pour salad oil or oil and vinegar over the whole, and serve.
Asparagus Salad, German Style Take sufficient cold boiled asparagus points and place in a basin with one-third of their quantity of crayfish tails. Season with salt and pepper. Pass through a sieve the yolks of half a dozen hard-boiled eggs and beat up with a little oil, vinegar and salt to the consistency of cream. Pour this over the asparagus mixture and serve in a salad bowl. Almost any cold shellfish may be used in place of the crayfish if desired.
Two cold hors-d'oeuvre salads in the Waldorf style, both built on the assumption that the cook already knows how a vinaigrette is balanced. The instructions are terse but complete; the main work is translating the pantry.
- AnchoviesOscar means whole salt-packed anchovies, which need filleting and a long rinse or soak in cold water (20-30 minutes, changed once) before they are edible on their own. Modern oil-packed fillets are already boned and much milder; drain them, pat dry, and skip the soaking.
- "Shred them lengthwise"Split each fillet into two or three thin strips along the grain, so they can be laid out in a lattice or spokes. This is a plating instruction, not a texture one.
- Hard eggsHard-boiled. The recipe asks only for "groups" of chopped egg, kept distinct from the parsley and onion; chopping white and yolk separately is one way to get contrasting borders, not something the text specifies.
- Salad oilIn an American kitchen of the 1890s this generally meant olive oil or, increasingly, cottonseed. Use a mild olive oil; a peppery modern one will fight the anchovy. With vinegar, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar is a common period proportion, and the anchovies should make extra salt unnecessary.
- OnionsChopped raw onion here should be very fine and, if strong, rinsed under cold water and squeezed dry. Shallot works well as a substitute, though the recipe calls for onion.
- Crayfish tailsCooked and peeled tails, sold frozen in most places. One-third the volume of the asparagus is the ratio given. Cooked shrimp, lobster or crab all substitute, as the recipe itself allows.
- The sieved-yolk dressingSix hard yolks pushed through a sieve and beaten with oil, vinegar and salt make a thick emulsion somewhere between mayonnaise and a sauce gribiche. Add the oil slowly, a spoonful at a time, or it will stay grainy; thin with a little more vinegar if it stiffens past the consistency of cream.
- Asparagus"Points" are the tips, roughly the top two inches. Boil in salted water until just tender, then cool quickly in cold water so they keep their colour, and drain well or the dressing will slacken on the plate.
- YieldNeither recipe states a quantity. Four to six as a first course is a reasonable guess for each, and six yolks make enough dressing for roughly a pound of trimmed tips, but neither figure comes from the text.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 book records the hotel's repertoire at a moment when American grand-hotel cooking was still essentially French, with some German and Austrian inflection. Both of these belong to the hors-d'oeuvre course, the small salted and pickled dishes set out before the soup, and both are exercises in arrangement as much as cookery: the anchovy plate depends on the neatness of its chopped-egg and caper borders. The "German style" tag on the asparagus salad seems to point to the sieved-yolk dressing rather than to any single regional dish; bound egg-yolk sauces of that kind were common in central European cold cookery, and crayfish were a familiar luxury garnish for spring asparagus. Oscar's note that "almost any cold shellfish may be used" is a reminder that these books were written for working cooks who were expected to substitute without being told twice.