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Salads Salads
Compound salads will be found described under their particular headings, such as Anchovy, Artichoke, Asparagus, Cress, etc. Other recipes are dealt with in the following list.
The simplest form of salad would be made by wiping perfectly dry a few leaves of lettuce, cutting them into broad shreds, and then dressing them as follows: Place the lettuce in a deep salad bowl fitted with a pair of servers, one partaking of the character of a spoon, and the other that of a fork. Supposing the bowl to be about two-thirds full of the lettuce, and having ascertained that it is carefully dried, pour into the spoon four charges of the best lucca oil, and stir this freely into the leaves, stirring vigorously with both servers. Then dust in enough salt to season nicely; pour into the spoon about one teaspoonful of tarragon vinegar, fill the spoon up with the best malt vinegar, and stir this in briskly. The salad is then ready to be served.
This is less a recipe than a house method for dressing lettuce in the bowl, which is how salads were made at table in the 1890s. The instructions hinge on one thing: the leaves must be bone dry, or the oil will slide off and the vinegar will pool.
- Dry the leaves firstOil cannot coat a wet leaf, and any water left clinging dilutes the dressing into something thin and sour. Spin or towel the lettuce until it squeaks before it goes near the bowl.
- "Four charges" of oilThis means four spoonfuls measured in the salad server itself. Server spoons vary considerably in capacity, so no exact conversion follows; the original is genuinely imprecise and the amount was meant to be judged by eye against the volume of leaves.
- Lucca oilLucca in Tuscany was a well-known source of fine table olive oil, and "Lucca oil" was commonly used to mean best-quality olive oil. Any good fruity extra-virgin oil stands in.
- The vinegarsOne teaspoon of tarragon vinegar topped up with malt vinegar fills the same spoon used for the oil, so the finished ratio is about four parts oil to one part vinegar -- less sharp than a modern 3:1. Malt vinegar is still sold; if it seems too assertive, cider vinegar is the nearest neighbour in weight.
- Order of operationsOil goes on before salt and vinegar. The recipe gives no reason, but coating the leaves in fat first is generally held to slow the salt drawing water out of them and keep the lettuce crisp longer in the bowl.
- Salt"Enough to season nicely" is left to the cook. Add it in the bowl rather than in a pre-mixed dressing so you can taste a leaf and correct.
- YieldA deep salad bowl two-thirds full of shredded lettuce might serve roughly four to six as a side course, though the recipe specifies neither bowl size nor yield. The dressing quantities scale with the volume of leaves.
This entry shows an older practice: dressing was not bottled or whisked in advance but built in the bowl, with the servers doubling as measuring spoons. The reliance on Lucca oil and malt vinegar suggests an Anglo-American hotel tradition rather than a French one, malt vinegar being a British staple. Tarragon vinegar, used here as a small accent rather than the whole acid, was one of several flavoured vinegars a nineteenth-century larder might keep. The cross-references at the head of the entry are a reminder that the book was organized as a reference work, and the reader was expected to hunt down anchovy or asparagus salad under its own letter.