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Cold Meat and Potato Salad
Cut one pound of cold meat into thin slices and then again into small squares, and mix with it one pint of chopped cold potatoes. Put a layer of this at the bottom of a salad-bowl, cover with parsley and salad dressing, and continue in this way until all the meat is used up. Place the bowl in a cool place for a couple of hours, and the salad is then ready for use.
A leftovers dish, and it behaves like one: the quality depends entirely on the meat you start with and the dressing you bind it with. A few points of translation.
- A pint of potatoesPotatoes here are measured by volume, not weight. A pint of chopped cooked potato is about 2 cups, or roughly 3/4 lb of boiled waxy potato before dicing. Cut it to the same size as the meat squares so the salad forks up evenly.
- "Salad dressing" in 1896The term at this date would most often mean either a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing or a cooked (boiled) dressing thickened with egg yolk; the recipe does not specify. Bottled mayonnaise was not yet a general commercial product in America. Either works; the vinaigrette gives a cleaner result with beef, the cooked dressing suits chicken or veal.
- Which meatAny roast that slices cold: beef, veal, lamb, ham, tongue, chicken. Avoid anything that was served in a heavy sauce, since the residual gravy muddies the dressing.
- Dress the potatoes warmSomething the recipe leaves out. Potatoes take up dressing better while still warm; once cold they tend to carry it on the surface. Toss them with a little of the dressing before assembling, then layer as directed.
- "A cool place"A larder or icebox is the likely reading for the period. Use the refrigerator, and keep the two hours to two hours rather than letting it stand out; cooked meat and cooked potato together are a good medium for bacteria at room temperature.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly, chopped, and used generously between the layers rather than as a garnish on top. It is doing the work of a green here.
- YieldA pound of meat with a pint of potato serves four as a lunch dish, six as part of a cold table. Toss the layers together lightly before serving, or serve down through them with a spoon.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maître d'hôtel in 1893 and put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a volume of some nine hundred pages that mixes hotel cookery with plainer domestic recipes. This is firmly in the second category: a way of using Sunday's roast on Monday, a type of dish common in household manuals of the era. Oscar's book is best remembered for the salad that bears the hotel's name, but the great bulk of it looks like this.