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Dutch Salad
Skin and bone a herring and cut it into small pieces; wash and bone eight or ten anchovies, and divide them into eight pieces each. Take an equal quantity each of cold fowl and German sausage and cut them into small square pieces. Chop in equal quantities some pickled gherkins and beet-root, and cut in rather large pieces twice the quantity of cold boiled potatoes. Mix all the ingredients except the anchovies together, with one or two chopped hard-boiled eggs and about two tablespoonfuls of chopped capers. Prepare a dressing with two parts of olive oil and one part of tarragon vinegar, and mix with it smoothly a small quantity of French mustard, seasoning it to taste with some white pepper. Pour the dressing over the salad, and serve it.
A composed herring salad of the sort Oscar's kitchen would have sent out cold from the larder. The ingredient list is loose by design — it is a way of using cold roast fowl and odds of sausage — but a few of the components mean something different now than they did in 1896.
- The herring is cured, not freshThe recipe assumes a salt or pickled herring from the barrel, ready to eat once skinned and boned. Use a jarred marinated or salt-cured herring fillet; if it is heavily salted, soak it in cold water or milk for an hour and taste before using. Fresh raw herring is not what is meant.
- Anchovies"Wash and bone" describes whole salt-packed anchovies, which need rinsing and splitting. Oil-packed fillets need neither — count two fillets for each whole fish called for, and cut each into three or four pieces rather than eight.
- Keep the anchovies outEvery ingredient is mixed except the anchovies. The recipe sets them aside and then never mentions them again, so the presumption must be that they go over the dressed salad at the end, staying whole and salting the dish in bites rather than throughout.
- German sausageIn books of this date the term generally meant a large cooked, sliceable smoked sausage of the cervelat or mettwurst sort rather than a fresh bratwurst. Any firm cooked garlic sausage, kielbasa or a good bologna-type sausage works; dice it about the same size as the fowl.
- Cold fowlLeftover roast chicken, capon or boiling fowl. Dark meat holds up better in a dressed salad than breast, which goes dry and stringy.
- Potatoes"Twice the quantity" is not tied to a stated referent; read in sequence it probably means twice the gherkin and beet, though it may be meant more loosely. Cut them in rather large pieces as directed, and use a waxy variety, boiled in their skins and cooled.
- Beet-rootCooked beet, chopped (the recipe does not say how fine). It will bleed pink through the bowl within an hour, which may or may not be wanted; if you want the components distinct, fold it in at the last moment.
- The dressingTwo parts oil to one part tarragon vinegar is sharper than a modern three-to-one, and it needs to be, against the potatoes. Whisk the mustard into the vinegar first, then the oil. Season with white pepper only and taste before adding any salt — the herring, anchovies and capers bring a great deal.
- Yield and servingServing -- No weights are given, so the yield depends entirely on how much cold fowl and sausage you have. Serve it cold, ideally after an hour chilled for the flavours to settle, on a bed of lettuce or with rye bread and butter.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 book, drew freely on the German and central European kitchen that supplied so much of New York's hotel cooking and so many of its cooks. "Dutch" in American usage of the period often stood for Deutsch — German — and that may well be the sense here, though Netherlandish herring salads of much the same construction also existed and the title cannot be settled either way. The dish is recognisably of the Heringssalat type, the cured-herring, beet, potato and pickle salad eaten across northern Germany and Scandinavia, and often associated with fast days and with New Year. It shares its logic — a cured or cold protein, a bland starch, something sour, and whatever cold meat the kitchen has left — with dishes as different as the Russian salade Olivier and the sailors' Labskaus. In a hotel of the Waldorf's scale that last point was not sentiment but economy.