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Russian Salad
Cut into thin slices the best part of some cold remains of salmon, partridges and chicken, arrange them on a salad dish, and mix with them in moderate quantities some cooked asparagus heads, carrots, turnips and cauliflower, all cut into small pieces, a few capers, shrimps, and a small quantity of caviar. Prepare a sufficient quantity of dressing with oil, mustard, vinegar and a small quantity of cayenne pepper; one tablespoonful of minced shallots should also be added. Pour the mixture over the above ingredients, and stand the salad on ice until ready to serve. Care should be taken in making this salad that all the ingredients taste, but that none of them predominate.
A leftovers dish dressed up for a grand hotel, written with no quantities at all. The proportions are yours to judge, and the recipe tells you the standard to judge them by.
- The hinge is balanceOscar's closing line is the whole instruction: every element should register, none should dominate. Work in roughly equal volumes of meat/fish and vegetables, then add the capers, shrimp and caviar in small amounts, tasting as you go.
- PartridgeNot a supermarket bird. Cold roast chicken thigh, guinea fowl or a little rare duck breast stands in without unbalancing the dish; skip it entirely rather than substituting something strongly flavoured.
- Cold remainsThis is built from cooked leftovers, so nothing here gets a second cooking. Use fish and poultry that has been properly chilled and is no more than two or three days old, and keep the finished salad cold until it goes to the table.
- Fresh vegetablesIf you are not working from leftovers, boil the carrots, turnips and cauliflower separately in salted water until just tender, then refresh in cold water so they stop cooking and hold their shape. Asparagus heads need two to three minutes only.
- Uniform diceCut the vegetables to a small, even dice so that a spoonful carries all of them; the recipe asks only for 'small pieces'. Slice the salmon and poultry thin, then cut to a similar size.
- The dressingA plain vinaigrette: three parts oil to one part vinegar, with mustard whisked in first to hold the emulsion. For a salad serving six, about a half cup of oil is ample. A tablespoon of minced shallot is a lot in that volume, so mince it very fine or soak it briefly in the vinegar to soften the bite.
- Caviar lastFold it in at the end with a light hand, or scatter it over the top. Stirred through a wet dressing it breaks up, muddies the colour and turns everything salty.
- Stand on iceRefrigerate, but not for long. An hour lets the flavours settle; much beyond that and the vinegar starts to dull the vegetables and grey the caviar.
- YieldNo quantities are given at all, so the yield is entirely yours to set; treated as a first course or luncheon salad, it scales to however much cold roast you have to hand.
Salade russe reached western menus in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its origin is usually traced to Lucien Olivier, the chef of the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow in the 1860s, whose luxurious composed salad became the ancestor of both the French salade russe and the Russian Olivier salad still eaten at New Year. The version that travelled to Paris and then to New York kept the diced root vegetables and the rich garnishes. Oscar's version belongs squarely to hotel practice: the Waldorf carved a great deal of cold salmon, chicken and game every day, and a dish that turned the best of yesterday's roasts into something worth a caviar garnish was good economy dressed as extravagance. The insistence that no single ingredient predominate is the professional discipline that separates it from a plate of scraps.