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Brunswick Salad
Peel and cut a fresh celeryroot into fine shreds and soak it in water for a quarter of an hour. Peel and boil four truffles for three minutes in a little Madeira wine. Rub the inside of a basin with a clove of garlic, put in it the yolks of four or five hard-boiled eggs and mash them to a smooth paste with a spoon; then add one teaspoonful of mustard, one teacupful of oil and a small quantity of vinegar. Drain the celery roots and truffles and mix them with the eggs. Season the salad, turn it into a salad-bowl, sprinkle over a small quantity of chopped tarragon and cloves, and serve.
A celeriac salad bound with a hard-yolk dressing rather than a raw-egg mayonnaise, which makes it more forgiving than it looks. The critical part is the dressing: mashed cooked yolks will only take the oil smoothly if it goes in slowly.
- Celery root"Celeryroot" is celeriac. Shred it fine on a mandoline or the julienne blade of a food processor, and use acidulated water (a squeeze of lemon in the soaking water) rather than plain, since cut celeriac browns within minutes.
- The soakA quarter of an hour in cold water crisps the shreds and takes off some of the raw bite. Drain and press it dry in a towel, or the dressing will slide off and pool.
- A teacupfulPeriod measure is not fixed: a teacupful is variously reckoned from about four to six fluid ounces, so somewhere between half and three-quarters of a cup of oil. Either way that is a great deal against four or five yolks; add it a spoonful at a time, working it in, and stop when the paste is thick and coats a spoon.
- TrufflesThe recipe has fresh truffles peeled and simmered three minutes in Madeira, a step that makes sense when truffles came in firm or preserved. Jarred or tinned truffles today are already cooked and need only a brief warming in the wine, or none at all. Truffle-flavoured oil is not the same thing and will not slice.
- SeasonThe recipe says only "season," leaving salt and pepper to the cook, and the salad needs both generously; celeriac is bland and the yolk dressing swallows salt. Taste after mixing, not before.
- "Chopped tarragon and cloves"Ambiguous as printed. Chopped whole cloves would be unpleasant; the likeliest intent is a very small pinch of ground clove alongside the tarragon. Err on the side of a scant pinch.
- GarlicRubbing the bowl with a cut clove is the whole garlic content. Do not mince it in; the dressing is meant to carry scent, not heat.
- Yield and serviceServes four to six as a first course or with cold meats. Better after twenty minutes in the refrigerator, though not much longer, as the celeriac softens and weeps.
Celeriac cut into fine shreds and dressed with a thick sauce is long established in German and Austrian cooking, where Sellerie-Salat is a staple, and the name Brunswick may well point that way, to Braunschweig rather than to Brunswick County and its stew -- though the book itself does not say so. Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large New York hotel kitchen around the turn of the century, where French technique dominated but German and Swiss dishes also appear. The dressing is a period marker in itself: a mayonnaise built on hard-boiled yolks rather than raw ones, which is more stable than an emulsion made with raw egg. The truffles turn a homely root-vegetable salad into something grander.