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Vegetable Salad
Boil some beet-root, celery and onions. When cold cut them into thick slices. Mix together one saltspoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of made mustard, one dessertspoonful of tarragon vinegar, and half a dozen drops of chili vinegar, and pour it over the vegetables.
A plain boiled-vegetable salad dressed with a sharp, oil-free mustard vinaigrette. The measurements are small and archaic, and the total dressing volume is barely a few teaspoons, so scale it to the amount of vegetables you actually cook.
- The unitsA saltspoonful is generally reckoned at 1/4 teaspoon; a dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons. So the dressing as written is about 1/4 tsp salt, 1 tbsp mustard, 2 tsp tarragon vinegar and a few drops of chili vinegar. The recipe gives no quantity of vegetables, so scale by taste.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard means mustard already mixed to a paste with liquid, as opposed to dry mustard powder. Any smooth prepared mustard works.
- Chili vinegarA nineteenth-century pantry staple: vinegar steeped with hot red peppers. A few drops of a simple cayenne-based hot sauce, or vinegar with a pinch of cayenne stirred in, gives the same effect. It is meant as a whisper of heat, not a dominant flavor.
- No oil, by designThis is a vinegar-and-mustard dressing with no oil at all, which makes it much sharper than a modern vinaigrette. Whisk the mustard and vinegars together so the mustard emulsifies and clings; if it reads as too aggressive, a tablespoon of oil brings it into modern range without changing its character.
- Cook the beets apartBoil the beets in their own pot and dress them separately if you want the salad to stay legible — beet juice will stain the celery and onion pink within minutes. Beets whole and unpeeled, 30-45 minutes depending on size; celery 5-8 minutes; small onions 15-20 minutes until just tender.
- OnionsThe recipe does not say what kind of onion. Small whole boiling onions hold their shape well when boiled and slice into neat rounds, which suits the "thick slices" instruction, though a boiled large onion could also be sliced.
- Serve at room temperatureThe recipe does have the vegetables cold before cutting, which matters for clean slices, but the salad tastes flat straight from the refrigerator. Dress it and let it stand 20-30 minutes off the chill.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was compiled while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, and much of it reads less like a chef's notebook than a working reference for a large hotel kitchen — thousands of short, unfussy entries covering every category a menu might need. This is one of them: a boiled-vegetable salad of the kind that filled out cold buffets and supper tables before raw salad greens were reliably available year-round in the northeastern United States. Dressings built on flavored vinegars and mustard with no oil appear frequently in English and American cookery of the period, and specialty vinegars — tarragon, chili, garlic, elder — were sold ready-made or put up at home, functioning much as bottled condiments do now. The beet, celery and onion combination is close in spirit to the composed cold vegetable salads that also produced Russian salad and later the American three-bean salad.