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Beet-Root Salad
This may be made with slices of cold beet-root arranged on a dish with ordinary salad dressing poured over them; or the slices of beet-root may be alternated with siles of hard-boiled eggs. Over this latter mixture, pour a dressing consisting of oil and vinegar seasoned with pepper and salt and garnish with a few pickled mushrooms, small onions and horseradish.
A dressed-salad formula rather than a procedure — Oscar assumes the beets are already cooked and cold, and leaves quantities to the cook. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- "Beet-root" means cooked beetsThe British-inflected term is just the beet; the recipe assumes it has already been boiled or roasted and chilled. Roasting whole in foil at 400F until a knife slides in, roughly 45-60 minutes for medium beets, gives a firmer slice than boiling and less bleeding onto the eggs.
- "Siles" is a typesetter's errorRead it as "slices." The eggs are meant to be sliced crosswise and shingled between the beet rounds.
- Ordinary salad dressingIn an 1896 hotel kitchen this most likely means a plain French dressing, oil and vinegar beaten with salt and pepper, rather than the bottled sweet dressings sold under that name now; period usage could also cover a boiled or mayonnaise-type dressing. The second version of the salad spells out oil and vinegar.
- Proportions for the vinaigretteThree parts oil to one part vinegar is a standard ratio; red wine vinegar suits beets better than cider. Dress the beets separately and lift them onto the platter if you want the egg whites to stay white.
- Pickled mushrooms and small onionsBoth are common period garnishes and both are still sold in jars. Cocktail onions or pickled pearl onions stand in exactly; drain them well so brine does not thin the dressing.
- HorseradishFreshly grated root, or prepared horseradish squeezed dry, scattered over the top. Prepared horseradish in cream sauce is too wet here and will slacken the dressing.
- YieldFigure one medium beet and one egg per person as a first-course salad; four beets and four eggs make a platter for four to six alongside other dishes.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the moment when American hotel dining was still speaking French and English at once, and "beet-root" is the English half of that vocabulary -- the term the London and continental cookery books used, carried into a New York kitchen. Beets with vinegar are old and widespread across northern and eastern Europe, where the root's keeping qualities made it one of the few salad vegetables available through winter; the addition of hard-boiled egg, pickled onions and horseradish suggests the German and Central European table more than the French one. The recipe's looseness is itself characteristic of the book, which in many places gives a combination rather than a set of measurements.