No. 2623

Beef Salad with Tomatoes

Salade de Boeuf aux Tomates

Scallop or trim in slices some cold boiled or braised beef, pare the pieces round-shaped, and season with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, also very finely cut-up chervil and chives; lay all on a plate or salad bowl, giving it a dome-shape, and garnish around the salad with peeled and quartered tomatoes.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A leftovers salad from Delmonico's kitchen, and one of the simplest entries in the book. The success of it rests entirely on cutting the beef properly and dressing it while it is still slightly warm.

"Scallop or trim in slices"Ranhofer asks for the cold beef in thin, even slices, each pared to a round so the plate looks deliberate rather than like a pile of scraps; a knife or a plain cutter will do. Slicing against the grain, around 1/8 inch thick, is a reasonable modern reading of it, and the offcuts are worth keeping for something else.
The hinge: dress it before it is coldSeasoning cold meat -- The recipe calls for cold boiled or braised beef, and cold beef takes on relatively little seasoning. If you are working from a fresh braise or boiled brisket, dressing the slices while they are still a touch above room temperature and letting them cool in the dressing will season them more thoroughly, though it is a departure from the text as written.
Oil and vinegar proportionsThe book gives no proportions and assumes a cook who knows them; roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar is a common working ratio. Use a plain wine vinegar and a neutral or mild olive oil, and season the beef itself with salt and pepper rather than relying on the dressing to carry it.
Chervil and chivesChervil is milder and more anise-scented than parsley, which is coarser, and the two are not really interchangeable. If you cannot find chervil, a mix of parsley with a very small amount of tarragon comes closer than parsley alone.
Peeling the tomatoesScore the skin, thirty seconds in boiling water, then into ice water. Peeling was routine in period professional cooking, and tomato skins were often thought hard to digest; here it also keeps the quarters from sliding off the plate.
Building the domeThe recipe asks for a dome shape with the tomato quarters garnishing around it. Layering the rounds of beef in overlapping rings, working inward and upward rather than heaping them, is one way to achieve it.
YieldAbout 1 lb of cooked beef and 3 tomatoes serves four as a first course or a light lunch. Boiled beef from a pot-au-feu, braised short rib, or the end of a roast all work; the meat should be tender enough to cut with a fork.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is as much an inventory as a cookbook — nearly 3,500 numbered preparations, many of them, like this one, a few lines describing what to do with what the kitchen already had. Cold-beef salads belong to the French professional tradition of reusing boiled and braised meat, the systematic economy that any restaurant working at that scale depended on. What marks the dish as Ranhofer's rather than domestic is the trimming into rounds and the domed presentation: the same yesterday's beef, arranged so a paying customer would order it. The tomato garnish is a small period signal too — tomatoes had moved from suspicion to fashion in American kitchens over the preceding half century, and by the 1890s a raw quartered tomato was an ordinary sight on a restaurant plate.