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French Salad
Chop fine a bunch of parsley, two shallots and half a dozen anchovies; lay them in a bowl and mix with them salt and mustard to taste, two tablespoonfuls of salad oil and one gill of vinegar. Stir all well together and then add, two or three at a time, some very thin slices of cold roasted or boiled meat, not more than three or four inches long. Shake the slices well in the dressing as they are put in. Cover the bowl closely and let the salad stand for three hours. Serve garnished with parsley and some slices of fat meat.
A cold-meat salad in the French manner: sliced roast or boiled beef steeped in a sharp anchovy vinaigrette. It stands or falls on how thin the meat is cut and how long it sits.
- A gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, four fluid ounces. Against only two tablespoons of oil that is an aggressively sour dressing by modern taste; most cooks today would reverse the proportion, or at least cut the vinegar to a couple of tablespoons and use a mild wine vinegar rather than distilled.
- The hinge: slice the meat paper-thinThe dressing has three hours to penetrate and nothing else to work with. Cut cold roast beef, veal or leg of lamb across the grain as thinly as a knife will manage, in pieces no longer than three or four inches, and add them a few at a time so each slice is coated rather than clumped.
- AnchoviesHalf a dozen most likely means six whole salt-cured fish, which would give something closer to a dozen modern oil-packed fillets; rinse and pat dry if salt-packed. Start nearer six fillets and taste. They dissolve into the dressing and supply most of the salt, so hold back the added salt until you have tasted.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder, stirred in with the salt; the recipe says only 'to taste', so start with about a teaspoon. Prepared Dijon works and will help the dressing emulsify, but it brings its own vinegar and acid; adjust accordingly.
- Salad oilPeriod salad oil was usually olive, sometimes cottonseed. Olive oil is the safer assumption for the flavour intended.
- The three-hour standRefrigerate it rather than leaving cooked meat at room temperature for three hours, and bring it back to cool room temperature before serving so the fat is not stiff. Stir once or twice while it steeps.
- "Slices of fat meat" for garnishProbably fatty slices from the joint itself, or thin slices of cold fat bacon or salt pork, laid over the salad as a richness against the vinegar. Prosciutto or a good cured fat serves the same purpose.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of meat or number of servings. The dressing suits roughly a pound of cooked meat, which would make about four servings as a first course or luncheon dish, with bread.
Nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookbooks used "French" to mean a salad dressed with oil, vinegar and seasonings rather than the boiled or cream dressings then standard in English and American kitchens, and this one is cold boiled or roast beef sliced thin and revived in a sharp vinaigrette with shallot, parsley and anchovy. That it appears in a Waldorf book is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was a broad compilation of European and American practice rather than a record of what the hotel actually plated; Oscar was the hotel's maître d'hôtel, not its chef, and the book gathers domestic standards alongside restaurant dishes.