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Japanese Salad
Mince three or four medium-sized truffles very fine, also two large, cold, boiled potatoes; put the whole into a basin, and season with one-half pinch each of pepper and salt, and a little grated nutmeg; pour over one-half wineglassful of champagne; and allow it to stand for two hours; add eighteen or twenty whole cooked mussels, one teaspoonful of chopped chives, and the same quantity of chopped parsley. Mix all well together, put the salad into a bowl, decorating it with six small white lettuce leaves, and six fillets of anchovies, and serve.
A cold composed salad of potato, mussel and truffle bound only by champagne and seasoning — no mayonnaise, no vinaigrette. It stands or falls on the marinating step, so do not shortcut it.
- The hinge: marinate warm potatoSlice or dice the potatoes while still warm from boiling and pour the champagne over at once; warm starch absorbs liquid, cold starch repels it. Oscar says "cold, boiled" potatoes, but two hours of standing is what makes the dish work, and warm potatoes drink far more of the wine in that time.
- Half a wineglassfulA wineglass in this period is about 2 fl oz, so use roughly 2 tablespoons of dry champagne or another dry sparkling wine. It will not sparkle by serving time and does not need to.
- "One-half pinch"Oscar's book measures seasoning in pinches and half-pinches throughout; it means a very small amount — a couple of good grinds of pepper and a scant eighth-teaspoon of salt for this quantity. Salt lightly at first; the mussels and anchovies bring plenty of their own.
- TrufflesThree or four medium truffles is an extravagance at modern prices and would cost more than the rest of the meal several times over. A single small truffle finely minced, or a teaspoon of good truffle paste stirred into the champagne, gives the intended perfume; truffle oil is a different and blunter flavour.
- PotatoesUse a waxy variety — fingerling, Yukon Gold, red-skinned — boiled in well-salted water and peeled while warm. A floury baking potato will break down into paste once you mix in the mussels.
- Cooking the musselsSteam scrubbed mussels in a covered pan with a splash of wine for 3 to 5 minutes, just until the shells open, then shell them immediately. Discard any that stay shut. Prolonged cooking shrinks them to erasers, which is fatal in a salad where they are meant to stay plump.
- Anchovy filletsOil-packed fillets, drained and patted dry, laid over the top as decoration rather than mixed in. Salt-packed anchovies should be rinsed and boned first.
- Yield and servingServes four as a first course, two as a light lunch. Serve cool but not refrigerator-cold — chilled potato tastes of nothing, and the truffle aroma is muted by cold.
A salad of potatoes, mussels and truffles is generally traced to Alexandre Dumas fils' play Francillon of 1887, in which a character describes exactly such a dish and calls it a Japanese salad — the name usually explained as a fashionable flourish of the period's japonisme rather than any claim to Japanese cooking. The dish as described in the play is dressed with oil, vinegar and white wine, with Château d'Yquem named by preference, so the champagne here is a variation. It circulated in restaurants as salade Francillon, and Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of it here places it among the borrowed French repertoire that the Waldorf served to Americans who wanted to eat what Paris was eating. The combination is less odd than it looks: cold potato is a sponge for aromatics, and truffles were far more plentiful in the 1880s than they are now.