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Bohemian Salad
Wash and dry well some lettuces, cut them into shreds and put them in a salad-bowl with some slices of beet-root on the top. Beat the yolks of two raw eggs with a small quantity of chopped onion, salt and mustard; when well-beaten, add three tablespoonfuls of oil and one tablespoonful of vinegar, a little at a time, beating well. Pour this dressing over the lettuce, and serve at once.
A hand-beaten emulsified dressing built directly on raw yolks, in the manner of a loose mayonnaise. The whole thing lives or dies on how slowly the oil goes in.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropTwo yolks will carry far more than three tablespoons of oil, but only if the first spoonful goes in almost drop by drop while you beat without stopping. Tipping it in at once gives a broken, greasy pool rather than a dressing.
- MustardIn a kitchen of this date "mustard" most likely means dry mustard powder rather than a prepared paste; a quarter teaspoon or so suits this quantity. It contributes emulsifying power as well as flavour; prepared jarred mustard works but thins the dressing slightly.
- Raw yolksThe dressing is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs in the shell if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished salad cold and brief.
- Beet-rootThe period assumption is beets already boiled or baked until tender, cooled and peeled, then sliced. Vacuum-packed cooked beets are the direct equivalent. Raw beet is not intended.
- Dry the lettuce properlyWater clinging to the leaves will thin and break the dressing on contact. A salad spinner, then a few minutes on a towel, does what the original means by "dry well."
- OnionChop it very fine, a teaspoon at most, or grate it. Coarse raw onion overwhelms three tablespoons of dressing entirely.
- Serve at onceThis is not decorative advice. An unstabilised yolk emulsion can begin to separate fairly quickly, and shredded lettuce collapses under oil and salt.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only "some lettuces"; the quantity of dressing given is modest, enough for a small side salad for a few people. Scale the oil and vinegar together, keeping the three-to-one ratio the recipe sets out.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, a period when salads were gaining ground as a course in their own right rather than an afterthought. The name is loose in the way period salad names often are: "Bohemian" on late nineteenth-century American menus seldom corresponded to any documented Czech dish, and may gesture either vaguely eastward toward Central Europe, where beets and sharp onion-and-vinegar dressings were at home, or at the artistic bohemianism then attached to anything informal and unfussy. The construction is essentially a loose mayonnaise sharpened with mustard and onion, and it belongs to a large family of raw-yolk dressings common in American cookbooks before commercial bottled mayonnaise became widely available in the early twentieth century.