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Game Salad
Take the required quantity and chop separately beet-roots, carrots and whites of hard-boiled eggs. Rub the bottom of a salad-bowl with onion and pour over a little lemon juice. Chop and pound some watercresses, mix them with an equal quantity of butter and form into small balls; repeat the operation with one tablespoonful of chopped carrot and two ounces of butter. Put some slices of cold cooked game at the bottom of a dish, decorate with the chopped vegetables, including a good supply of lettuce leaves and other vegetables in season, pour over a tartar sauce, sprinkle over the chopped egg, over this put a few slices of beet-root, decorate the edge of the dish with the balls of butter, pour round a mayonnaise dressing, and serve.
This is a composed salad rather than a tossed one, assembled from cold roast game and built up in layers on the platter. Nothing here is cooked, so everything depends on preparation and on serving it cold.
- Quantities are left to youOscar gives no measures beyond the butter and the tablespoon of carrot. As a working guide, about 1 lb of picked cold game meat with a head of lettuce, two medium beets and two carrots serves four as a lunch course.
- "Cold cooked game"This assumes yesterday's roast pheasant, partridge, grouse or venison. Any roast dark-meated bird works, and duck legs or leftover roast venison loin are the closest easy substitutes. Slice across the grain and keep the slices thin.
- Beet-roots are cookedThe recipe does not say so, as with much else here, but raw beet will bleed and taste harsh in this dish. Use cooked, peeled and cooled beets, and chop them last so they do not stain the eggs and carrots.
- Tartar sauce of 1896Tartar sauce here is not the jarred relish. In this period it was generally a mayonnaise-type sauce sharpened with mustard or lemon and folded with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot or onion and herbs; formulas varied. It wants to be thick enough to sit on the meat rather than run off it.
- Two dressings on purposeTwo dressings -- the tartar sauce goes over the game, plain mayonnaise is poured in a ring around the base, as the recipe directs. Keep them distinct rather than letting them merge.
- Compound butter ballsPound the watercress to a paste before working it into softened butter, or the salad ends up with green flecks and streaks. Chill the mixture until firm, scoop with a melon baller or two teaspoons, and hold the balls on ice until the moment of service or they will slump.
- The onion rubA cut onion drawn round the bowl leaves only a trace of scent. Note that the recipe then switches from the salad-bowl to "a dish" for the actual assembly, without explaining the change.
- Assemble at the last minuteOnce the mayonnaise touches the lettuce the leaves collapse. Have every component chopped, chilled and separately covered, then build the dish immediately before it goes to the table.
Oscar Tschirky was never the chef of the Waldorf; he was maître d'hôtel, the front-of-house authority over what the dining rooms served. This salad reflects the composed, decorated style of the 1890s: cold meat treated as a canvas, ringed and dotted and layered with colour. Salads of this kind plausibly suited kitchens where roast birds from a previous service reappeared cold the next day, though the recipe itself says nothing about leftovers. The decorative logic — chopped egg white, beet, carrot and cress used as pigments, butter rolled into shapes around the rim — belongs to the same late nineteenth-century garde-manger tradition that produced aspics and chaud-froid work. Watercress and beet were both standard American market vegetables by this date, and the tartar sauce places the dish on the French-trained side of the kitchen.