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Dumas Salad
Pound together a very small quantity of anchovy and tunny (about one teaspoonful of each), put the yolk of a hard-boiled egg in a salad-bowl with one tablespoonful of salad oil and mash it to a smooth paste; then mix in the pounded tunny and anchovy and a little French mustard. Chop fine the white of a hard-boiled egg, a small pickled cucumber, a few stalks of chervil and a little soy. Mix all the ingredients together in the salad-bowl with one wineglassful of wine vinegar, then arrange tastefully over the salad a few slices each of boiled potatoes, turnip-root and beet-root and season to taste with salt and pepper. Stir the above mixture with a fork, then serve it. The above salad is from a recipe designed and used by Alexander Dumas.
A dressing built in the bowl and a plate of cooked root vegetables laid over it. The instructions assume a cook who knows that the yolk-and-oil paste must come first; everything else is folded into that base.
- Build the base before the vinegarMash the hard yolk into the oil until it is genuinely smooth, then work in the pounded fish and mustard. If the vinegar goes in early the paste will not come together and the dressing separates into oily fish water.
- TunnyTunny is tuna. In a recipe of this date it will usually have meant preserved tuna in oil, from a tin or jar, rather than a fresh steak; a teaspoon of good oil-packed tuna, drained and pounded, is what the recipe wants.
- AnchovySalt-packed or oil-packed fillets pounded to a paste, or an equivalent squeeze of anchovy paste. A teaspoon is genuinely all that is intended — the two fish are seasoning, not a filling.
- French mustardA Dijon-style prepared mustard. American-style yellow mustard is milder and more vinegary, coloured with turmeric, and will read wrong here.
- A wineglassful of wine vinegarRoughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Against a single tablespoon of oil that is a fiercely sharp dressing by modern taste; many cooks will want to hold back half of it and add to taste, or raise the oil.
- A little soySoy sauce, at this date typically an imported Chinese or Japanese product, though domestic imitations also circulated. A teaspoon is a fair reading of "a little," and it also brings salt, so season at the very end.
- ChervilSold fresh in some markets and easily grown, but rarely stocked. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gives the closest approximation of its faint anise note; dried chervil has none of it.
- The vegetablesPotatoes, turnip and beetroot are all boiled and sliced, and all should be cool or barely warm. Slice the beet last and lay it on top, or it stains the whole bowl before it reaches the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; as written it dresses a small first-course salad. Salt cautiously: anchovy, tuna, soy and pickled cucumber are all salted already.
Alexandre Dumas the elder was as serious about food as about novels, and a closely similar salad appears in the Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, the vast culinary encyclopedia he finished shortly before his death in 1870 and which was published posthumously in 1873; whether this version was taken directly from it is not stated on the page. Dumas is said to have made a performance of mixing his own salad dressing, working the hard yolk and oil into a paste before anything else went in — an anecdote that the ordering of these instructions matches. That Oscar Tschirky reproduced it in a New York hotel cookbook of the 1890s says something about how far the French literary-gastronomic tradition reached: an American dining room could sell a salad on an author's name alone. The heavy dose of anchovy, tuna and soy also marks the period's taste for what would later be called umami, laid in through preserved fish long before anyone had a word for it.