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Truffle Salad
Pick out all the black spots from half a dozen white truffles, wash them thoroughly, wipe them dry on a cloth and chop them up as fine as possible. Pour a little oil into a saucepan, add two or three fillets of anchovies rubbed through a fine sieve, make the oil hot, add the truffles and a little seasoning, remove the saucepan from the fire, toss it for a minute or two, turn the salad into a bowl, and serve.
A late-Victorian luxury course of about four lines, and almost all of the difficulty is in the shopping rather than the cooking. The one thing to get right is heat management.
- Keep the truffle off the heatWhite truffle aroma is volatile and largely gone within a minute of real heat. Note that the recipe has you pull the pan from the fire before the tossing; treat the hot oil and anchovy as a dressing that warms the truffle through, not as a sauté.
- Which white truffle"White truffle" was not a precise term: it could cover the Piedmont Tuber magnatum pico, the smaller spring bianchetto, and possibly the pale Choiromyces of northern Europe. They are handled similarly here, though they differ markedly in aroma and the price differs by an order of magnitude.
- Half a dozen trufflesA market white truffle runs roughly 15–30 g, so six is somewhere around 90–180 g — a very large amount by current standards. Scaled down, 20–30 g of truffle with one anchovy fillet and a tablespoon of oil makes a plausible modern portion for two.
- Black spotsProbably bruises, embedded grit and rot at the surface. Modern practice is to brush a truffle clean with a dry or barely damp brush and pare the damaged skin with a knife rather than wash it, since soaking waterlogs the flesh and dulls the smell.
- Anchovies rubbed through a sieveThat is anchovy paste. A scant teaspoon of tubed anchovy paste, or salt-packed anchovy mashed with the flat of a knife, does the same work; if using salt-packed fish, rinse and bone them first.
- The oilUnspecified; olive oil is the likeliest intention for a hotel kitchen of the 1890s. Use a mild one — a peppery modern extra-virgin will fight the truffle.
- SeasoningAnchovy brings most of the salt, so season at the end. Black pepper and a few drops of lemon are reasonable additions, though Oscar specifies only "a little seasoning".
- ServingServe immediately, barely warm, in small quantity — this is a course between richer dishes, or a spoonful over toast, eggs or plain risotto rather than a bowl of salad.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name fronts The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was compiling recipes for a hotel that had made conspicuous ingredients part of its appeal, and truffles appear throughout the book as a marker of that kind of dining. "Salad" here carries its older, broader sense of something dressed with oil rather than something cold and leafy. The pairing of white truffle with anchovy and oil is Piedmontese in feeling, close to the anchovy-and-oil preparations of the same region that also produced the Alba truffle trade, and the technique of using a salty, cured fish to carry an aromatic through fat is a very old one. Whether Oscar took it from an Italian source or from the French professional repertoire he trained in is not recorded; the book gives no attributions.