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Leek Salad
Cut the white part of some young leeks into small equal-sized pieces. Scald a large tomato, remove the skin, leave until cold, and cut into thin slices. Wash a head of lettuce, break off the leaves, and arrange them in a fancy dish; then put in sliced tomato, and next the leeks. Mix together some oil and vinegar, using most of the former, dust in some pepper and salt, and pour it over the salad. Sprinkle over a few tarragon leaves, garnish with small tomatoes, and serve.
A straightforward composed salad from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen, written for cooks who were assumed to know how to dress a salad by eye. Two things need attention: the leeks and the vinaigrette ratio.
- Raw leeks are the whole pointNothing here is cooked, so the leeks must be young and slender — pencil-thick, not the heavy winter leeks sold now. Older leeks eaten raw are fibrous and aggressively oniony; if that is all you can get, slice them paper-thin crosswise and soak the slices in ice water for ten minutes to soften the bite.
- Wash them properlyGrit hides between the layers well down into the white. Slice first, then wash the pieces in a bowl of water and lift them out, leaving the sand behind.
- "Scald a large tomato"Thirty seconds in boiling water, then into cold water; the skin slips off. The instruction to leave it until cold matters — a warm tomato wilts the lettuce and thins the dressing.
- Oil and vinegar, "using most of the former"Period dressings are commonly given at somewhere around three parts oil to one of vinegar, though the proportions vary from book to book and the recipe itself only says to use more oil than vinegar. Olive oil and a wine vinegar are the likely choices; whisk the salt into the vinegar first so it dissolves.
- TarragonFresh leaves, torn or left whole, not dried. Only a few are called for, but tarragon and leek go well together, so it is not a garnish to skip.
- Assembly orderLettuce leaves broken off and arranged in the dish, tomato next, leeks on top — this is a layered presentation salad, not a tossed one. Dress it at the last moment and take it to the table undisturbed.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; one head of lettuce and one large tomato would serve about four as a side salad. "Small tomatoes" for garnish suggests cherry or currant tomatoes, halved or whole.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and his 1896 Cook Book is a vast, plainly written compendium of what a first-class American hotel kitchen actually served — some nine hundred pages of it, with dozens of salads alone. Leeks appear here as a salad vegetable rather than a soup base, which was more a French habit than an American one at the time; poireaux en salade, traditionally a cooked-leek dish dressed with a sharp vinaigrette, was often said to be common bistro fare, and Oscar's kitchen was staffed and trained on French lines. The tomato is the more modern element: by the 1890s hotel menus were using it freely, raw and peeled, for exactly the color it brings to a plate of pale leek and green lettuce.