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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Insalata
No. 178. Insalata di patate (Potato salad) Ingredients: New potatoes, oil, white vinegar, onions, parsley, tarragon, chervil, celery, cream, salt, pepper, tarragon vinegar, watercress, cucumber, truffles.
Steam as many new potatoes as you require until they are well cooked, let them get cold, cut them into slices and pour three teaspoonsful of salad oil and one of white vinegar over them. Then rub a salad bowl with onion, put in a layer of the potato slices, and sprinkle with chopped parsley, tarragon, chervil, and celery, then another layer of potatoes until you have used all the potatoes; cover them with whipped cream seasoned with salt, pepper, and a little tarragon vinegar, and garnish the top with watercress, a few thin slices of truffle cooked in white wine, and some slices of cooked cucumber.
No. 179. Insalata alla Navarino (Salad) Ingredients: Peas, beans, onions, potatoes, tarragon, chives, parsley, tomatoes, anchovies, oil, vinegar, ham. Mix a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, a teaspoonful of chopped onion, a teaspoonful of tarragon and chopped chives with half a gill of oil and half a gill of vinegar.
Put this into a salad bowl with all sorts of cooked vegetables-peas, haricot beans, small onions, and potatoes cut up, and mix them well but gently, so as not to break the vegetables. Then add two or three anchovies in oil, and on the top place three or four ripe tomatoes cut in slices.
A little cooked smoked ham cut in dice added to this salad is a great improvement.
No. 180. Insalata di pomidoro (Tomato Salad) Ingredients: Tomatoes, mayonnaise, shallot, horseradish, gherkin, anchovies, fish, cucumber, lettuce, chervil, tarragon, eggs. a Mix the following ingredients: two anchovies in oil boned and minced, a gill of mayonnaise sauce, a little grated horse-radish, very little chopped shallot, a little cold salmon or trout, and a small gherkin chopped. With this mixture stuff some ripe tomatoes. Then make a good salad of endive or lettuce, a teaspoonful of chopped tarragon and chervil, season it with oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper (the proportions should be three of oil to one of vinegar), put a layer of slices of cucumber in the salad, place the tomatoes on the top of these, and decorate them with hard-boiled eggs passed through a wire sieve.
No. 181. Tartufi alla Dino (Truffles) Ingredients: Truffles, fowl forcemeat, champagne. a Allow one truffle for each person, scoop out the inside, chop it up fine and mix with a good forcemeat of fowl.
With this fill up the truffles, place a thin layer of truffle on the top of each, and cook them in champagne in stewpan for about half an hour. Then take them out, make a rich sauce, to which add the champagne you have used and some of the chopped truffle, put the truffles in this sauce and keep hot for ten minutes. Serve in paper soufflé cases.
Four cold-table dishes from the salad end of the book, written for a kitchen with a larder of fresh herbs and a truffle budget. The measurements are mostly by eye; the two places that need pinning down are the gill and the dressing on the potato salad.
- A gillIn an English book of this date a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 imperial fl oz (about 142 ml); the 4 fl oz half-cup gill is the American one. No. 179 therefore wants roughly equal volumes of oil and vinegar, about 2½ fl oz each, a sharp one-to-one dressing by modern taste; cut the vinegar back if you want it to sit alongside the anchovies rather than fight them. No. 180's gill of mayonnaise is the same measure.
- Whipped cream as a dressingUnsweetened cream whipped to soft peaks, slackened with salt, pepper and tarragon vinegar. It breaks within an hour or two, so assemble No. 178 close to serving and keep it cold.
- TrufflesNo. 181 assumes large whole fresh truffles at a price no longer imaginable, one per person, hollowed out like small peppers. There is no honest substitute; large brown mushroom caps stuffed with the same forcemeat make a different and perfectly good dish, but call it something else. Preserved truffles in jars will not hold up to thirty minutes of stewing.
- Fowl forcemeatA chicken forcemeat; a pounded quenelle-style mixture of raw breast with egg and cream is one reading, though forcemeats of the period were often bound with a panada instead. It sets as it cooks, which is what holds the truffle together. The half hour of gentle simmering in champagne that the recipe directs is ample; the liquid should barely tremble.
- Chervil and tarragonBoth are used raw here, and chervil in particular loses almost everything in drying. If fresh chervil is unavailable, use flat parsley with a little extra tarragon rather than dried chervil.
- Cooked cucumberPeeled, seeded, cut in thick slices and simmered in salted water or a little butter until translucent, then cooled. No. 178 calls for it specifically; No. 180's cucumber is not specified as cooked. It is milder and softer than raw cucumber, and is not a mistake in the text.
- Salmon or trout in No. 180Cold cooked fish, flaked fine — the tail end of yesterday's poached fish. The stuffed tomatoes are a raw assembly held together by mayonnaise, so use fish that has been properly cooked and chilled, and eat them the day they are made.
- YieldNos. 178 to 180 are all scaled to the bowl rather than the head; a pound of potatoes or a pound of mixed cooked vegetables serves four as a side. No. 181 is explicitly one truffle per person and belongs as a small hot savoury, not a course.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) frames its recipes as ten days of dinners discussed by a house party in Italy, and this run of insalate shows how the composed salad worked in that world: not leaves in a bowl but cooked vegetables, fish, ham and herbs arranged in layers and crowned with a garnish. No. 179's name is often traced to Navarino, the Greek bay whose 1827 battle is said to have given nineteenth-century cooks a fashionable label attached to several unrelated dishes, though the derivation from navet, turnip, is at least as commonly given; either way the connection is decorative rather than culinary. The potato salad under whipped cream and the truffle stuffed with chicken forcemeat both belong to the French-influenced grand cookery that Italian and English kitchens of the period shared; truffles at one per diner mark the recipe as written for a household that entertained. Tarragon vinegar, called for here as a distinct seasoning, was a standard bottle on the shelf then and is worth making or buying if you cook much from books of this vintage.