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Vanderbilt Garnish
This is prepared with green peppers, tomatoes and shrimps as follows: Peel and chop a green pepper, put it in a saucepan with a tomato cut into small pieces, one ounce of butter and eighteen picked and minced shrimps; season with salt and pepper, cook for ten minutes, and it is ready for use.
A small pan-cooked garnish meant to be spooned over fish or eggs rather than served alone. The whole thing takes ten minutes and hinges on how you treat the shrimp.
- "Picked" shrimpThe term generally means shelled and cleaned, and shrimp of the period were commonly sold already boiled, so read this as cooked shrimp. If you start with raw ones, add them in the last minute or two of cooking or they will turn rubbery over a ten-minute simmer.
- Peeling the pepperThe recipe says to peel it, which can be done by blistering the pepper and slipping the skin off, or with a vegetable peeler on a flat-sided pepper. Skipping it leaves tough flecks of skin in a fine garnish.
- One ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. That is a generous amount for one pepper and one tomato, and it is deliberate — the butter is the sauce that binds the garnish.
- The tomato does the workCook until the tomato has broken down and the mixture holds together in a spoon rather than weeping liquid. If it looks watery at ten minutes, keep going over moderate heat; a loose garnish will run across the plate.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, and nothing else in the original. A squeeze of lemon at the end is an optional modern addition.
- Yield and useThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly a cup, enough to garnish several portions of fish, an omelette, or halved hard-boiled eggs. Serve warm, as the butter will set when chilled.
Oscar Tschirky's book is full of garnishes and dishes named for the guests who ate them, and the Vanderbilts were among the Waldorf's most conspicuous patrons; the hotel stood on the site of William Waldorf Astor's Fifth Avenue mansion. Naming a preparation after a family was standard hotel practice on both sides of the Atlantic: it flattered the customer, gave the kitchen a shorthand, and let the menu look bespoke without new work.