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Jardiniere Salad
Cut into fine strips some beet-root, turnips, carrots and potatoes, mix with them some peas, haricot beans and lentils, put them all together in a saucepan with a lump of butter, cover with water, and boil them until they are cooked, then drain off the water and leave them until cold. Make a dressing with some oil, mayonnaise sauce, one dessertspoonful of vinegar, one teaspoonful of mustard, a small quantity of cayenne and salt. When well mixed, pour the dressing into a salad dish, mix the prepared vegetables lightly in, and serve.
A composed vegetable salad of the French service tradition, written for a kitchen with several pans going at once. The instruction to boil everything together is the one thing worth ignoring.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyBeets, turnips, carrots and potatoes have very different cooking times, and beets will stain everything in the pot magenta. Boil or steam each in its own water until just tender, then spread on a tray to cool so they dry rather than steam. Peas and green beans want two to four minutes and a cold rinse to hold their colour.
- Haricot beans and lentilsIn 1896 these meant dried pulses. Lentils need 20-30 minutes; dried haricots need overnight soaking and an hour or more, and are best cooked ahead. Canned white beans and cooked lentils are a fair substitute; if you use fresh green beans instead of haricots, note the recipe already accounts for peas separately.
- DessertspoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, conventionally two teaspoons. So roughly 10 ml of vinegar to a teaspoon of mustard - a sharp, mustard-forward dressing by design.
- "Oil, mayonnaise sauce"The oil most likely serves to loosen a stiff house mayonnaise into a pourable dressing. The recipe gives no quantities for either, so beat oil into the mayonnaise a spoonful at a time until it coats a vegetable without clinging in lumps.
- Dressing in the bowl firstPouring the dressing into the dish and folding the vegetables into it, rather than the reverse, coats everything with the least stirring, which keeps the potato cubes from breaking down and the beet colour from spreading. Whether the author intended that is not stated.
- Knife work"Fine strips" means julienne, about 1/8 inch square and an inch or two long. Uniformity is the whole point of the dish; a food processor's shredding disc will not give the same result.
- Salt and temperatureBoiled vegetables that have gone cold taste flat. Salt them while warm, and dress the salad no more than an hour before serving so it is cool rather than refrigerator-cold.
Jardinière is French for a woman gardener, and in professional cookery it came to mean any dish built on a mixture of spring vegetables cut to matching shapes - most familiarly a hot garnish of carrot, turnip and green beans arranged in tidy groups around a roast. Here the same idea is served cold and bound with mayonnaise, a form of salad that Escoffier's generation classed among the salades composées. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf during exactly the years when this style of French cold buffet work defined luxury service in New York. The dressing - mayonnaise cut with oil, sharpened with mustard, vinegar and cayenne - is often seen as a forerunner of the mayonnaise-bound vegetable salads that became standard American picnic fare a generation later.