No. 2622

Bagration Salad

Salade a la Bagration

Have some very white lettuce leaves, some anchovies, marinated tunny fish, stoned olives, beetroot cut small, minced gherkins and escalops of lobster. Season the lettuce leaves and lay them at the bottom of a bowl; also season the other ingredients with a little mayonnaise (No. 606), lay them on top of the lettuce, and dredge over and around a border of chopped truffles to decorate. Place on top quartered hard-boiled eggs, in the center a pretty lettuce heart, and around this some chervil, tarragon, water cress, parsley, burnet and chives, all chopped up very fine and divided into six parts, arranging them tastefully around the lettuce heart.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed salad from Delmonico's, built in a bowl rather than tossed. Nothing here is difficult, but the order of assembly is the whole point: the lettuce is dressed separately and the garnished ingredients sit on top of it.

Tunny fishTunny is tuna. "Marinated" here means tuna preserved in oil, the Mediterranean style sold in jars or tins today; good oil-packed tuna in large flakes is the right thing, not water-packed flakes.
Escalops of lobsterEscalops are slices cut crosswise from a cooked lobster tail, thin enough to lie flat. The recipe gives no quantity, so how much lobster the bowl needs is left to the cook.
The mayonnaiseNo. 606 in the same book is the mayonnaise the recipe points to. The text has the mayonnaise going on the anchovies, tuna, olives, beets, gherkins and lobster only; the lettuce is simply "seasoned," without saying with what, so a light plain dressing is the usual reading.
Beets bleedDress the diced beetroot on its own and add it last, or the mayonnaise on everything else turns pink. The original does not mention this.
BurnetSalad burnet, a cucumber-scented herb once common in kitchen gardens, is now hard to buy. Leave it out rather than substituting, or add a little finely diced cucumber for the same note.
TrufflesThe chopped truffle border is decoration and can be omitted without harming the salad. A teaspoon of finely chopped preserved truffle, or truffle peelings, gives the same dark ring for a fraction of the cost.
AnchoviesAnchovies of the period were generally salt-packed and are likely to have been saltier than modern oil-packed fillets. Rinse and pat them dry, and taste before salting anything else in the bowl.
Serve at oncePrepare every component separately, chill them, and build the bowl just before it goes to the table; a dressed composed salad does not stand well.

A Little History

Dishes labelled a la Bagration - a salad, a garnish, and best known a veal-and-macaroni soup - trace to the name of Pyotr Bagration, the Russian general mortally wounded at Borodino in 1812, though the culinary association is generally credited to his widow, Princess Catherine Bagration, a celebrated hostess in Vienna and Paris in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. Whatever the origin, by the late nineteenth century the name was attached in French professional kitchens to a small family of preparations, and Escoffier lists both a Bagration soup and a Bagration salad. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, was working squarely inside that French repertoire; his "cooked salads" chapter is full of these composed, arranged bowls.