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Salted Herring Salad
Cut off the heads and cut down the backs of some salted herrings, take out the bones carefully, remove the fillets, and cut them in small pieces. Put some cold boiled potatoes cut in dice into a deep dish with one raw apple and a little cold roasted veal, also cut in dice. Mix with the fish some pickled beet-root, salted cucumber, and a few gherkins, all finely chopped; put them in with the other ingredients, sprinkle over salt, mustard, one pinch of chopped chives, and one handful of capers, and pour in some vinegar and oil. Thicken the salad with a teacupful of mayonnaise sauce, dish it in a dome shape, smooth the surface with a knife, and mask it with more of the mayonnaise. Decorate it with gherkins, capers, anchovy fillets, and cherries in vinegar, put a few lettuce hearts in the center, surround the base with croutons of aspic jelly, and serve.
A composed cold salad of the German-Scandinavian type, built to be unmoulded and decorated rather than tossed. Nearly everything can be done a day ahead; the only step that will ruin it is skipping the soak.
- Soak the herring firstOscar assumes salt herring straight from the barrel, which is far saltier than anything sold today as "salted herring." Whole salt-cured fillets need 8-12 hours in cold water in the refrigerator, changed two or three times, and a taste before you commit. Skip this and the salad is inedible.
- What to buy insteadBarrel-salted whole herring is still sold in Eastern European and Scandinavian shops. Ready-made matjes or schmaltz herring fillets in oil or brine work and need only a brief rinse; do not soak those, as they are already mild.
- Teacupful of mayonnaiseA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at around 6 fluid ounces, though the measure was never standardised, so roughly three-quarters of a cup for binding, plus more again for masking the outside. Make a firm mayonnaise; a loose one will slump off the dome.
- Salted cucumberMost likely a brine-cured pickle rather than a vinegar-pickled one. Gherkins are listed separately, so they are probably the small sharp sour type, used as an accent.
- MustardUnqualified 'mustard' in cookbooks of this period usually means dry mustard powder, though prepared mustard is possible. Start with half a teaspoon; the herring, beets and pickles are already assertive.
- Cold roasted vealA leftover ingredient, in a kitchen likely to have roast veal to hand. Cold roast pork or chicken stands in without much loss, and the salad is perfectly good with the meat left out entirely.
- Cherries in vinegarPickled sour cherries, still sold in Middle Eastern and German shops. Cocktail cherries are not the same thing and will read as sweet; pickled red grapes or nothing at all are better substitutes.
- Aspic croutonsFirm aspic (about 1 envelope of gelatine per cup of clarified stock) set in a shallow pan, chilled hard, then cut into small cubes and arranged round the base. They are decoration and will soften at room temperature, so add them at the last moment.
- Chilling and yieldChilling -- Mix and refrigerate at least four hours so the beets colour the potatoes and the dressing tightens; only then shape the dome and mask it. The recipe gives no quantities, so the yield depends entirely on how much herring and potato you start with.
Salted herring salad is the hotel-dining-room version of a dish that belongs to the whole Baltic and North Sea world: Swedish sillsallad, German Heringssalat, Russian and Polish relatives that all combine cured herring with cooked potato, beetroot, apple and pickles. Barrel-salted herring was one of the great preserved staples of northern Europe for centuries, cheap enough to be peasant food and portable enough to travel inland, and versions of the salad were traditionally eaten at Christmas and at New Year. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and compiled this book in 1896, was Swiss-born and cooking for a New York clientele that included a large and prosperous German-speaking population, so a great many Central European dishes appear in his pages dressed for service. What marks this one as hotel work rather than home cooking is the finish: the salad is bound, moulded into a dome, masked in mayonnaise like a chaud-froid and ringed with cut aspic, the same decorative grammar Escoffier's generation applied to almost every cold buffet piece.