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Salad Demi-Devil
Cut in slices a few cooked peeled truffles and potatoes, arrange them alternately in a salad-bowl well brushed with oil, garnish with small cooked onions and stoned olives, pour over a mixture of oil and vinegar or oil and white wine, and serve. The salad should be allowed to soak for at least two hours before it is used.
A cold composed salad from the Waldorf's kitchen, written in the shorthand of a professional cook who assumed his reader knew the rest. Almost everything here rests on two things: the potato holding its shape, and the two-hour soak.
- The soak is the recipeTwo hours in the dressing is what makes this more than sliced potato. Warm potatoes absorb dressing far better than cold ones, so dress them while still tepid and let the salad come together at cool room temperature rather than in the refrigerator, where the oil stiffens and the flavour flattens.
- PotatoesUse a waxy variety — fingerling, Yukon Gold, red-skinned — boiled whole in their skins, peeled while hot, then sliced about a quarter inch thick. Floury baking potatoes tend to crumble when sliced and dressed and will not hold neat slices for two hours.
- TrufflesMost likely black winter truffle, of the sort sold cooked and tinned in his day, which fits the recipe's "cooked peeled truffles." Fresh or preserved black truffle is the honest substitute; most truffle oil is a different, largely synthetic flavour and will dominate rather than perfume. Failing truffle, cooked cremini or a few reconstituted dried porcini give the earthy dark note the dish is built around, without pretending to be the same thing.
- Small cooked onionsPearl or cipollini onions, peeled and simmered until just tender, then cooled. Frozen peeled pearl onions, boiled briefly, are a reasonable stand-in.
- Stoned olivesSimply pitted. The text does not say which kind; green olives in brine are a plausible reading, and anything firm and not overly cured works.
- The dressingHe gives no proportions. Three parts oil to one part vinegar is a common proportion in period sources, and the white wine version wants rather more wine, closer to two to one, since wine is far less sharp than vinegar. Season with salt and pepper — Oscar does not mention it, but the omission is almost certainly shorthand.
- "Demi-devil"A devilled dish in the nineteenth century was one sharpened with hot condiments, mustard and cayenne chief among them. Nothing in the text supplies either, so if you want the name to make sense, whisk a scant teaspoon of Dijon and a pinch of cayenne into the dressing — a lighter hand than a full devil would take.
- YieldRoughly four as a first course from about a pound of potatoes, a small tin of truffles, a dozen onions and a handful of olives. Bring it back to room temperature before serving.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel, the man in the dining room — but his 1896 collection gathered the house repertoire, and this salad shows the kitchen's French training plainly: a salade composée of potato and truffle, dressed and left to macerate, is standard Escoffier-era practice. The name belongs to a naming habit rather than a place. English and American cooks had used "devilled" since at least the late eighteenth century for dishes sharpened with mustard and cayenne, and a diminutive of that sort promises a degree of heat without committing to it. The dish may also record something of the price of truffles in a New York hotel at the turn of the century: expensive, but ordinary enough to slice into a potato salad.