No. 2640

Mirabeau Salad

Salade a la Mirabeau

Have some shrimp tails, blanched oysters, truffles cooked in white wine, and potatoes baked in their skins, and cut into bits while hot, also the truffles. Season each article separately with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar; macerate them from fifteen to twenty minutes, then drain and mix them together in a bowl, and thicken with a mayonnaise sauce (No. 606), and a little tarragon mustard. Dress the salad in a salad bowl, smooth the surface, and decorate the top with some shrimp tails and truffles kept aside for this purpose.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed shellfish-and-potato salad from Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire, built on the principle that each element is seasoned on its own before anything is combined. That separate seasoning is the whole point of the dish and the step most likely to be skipped.

Dress the potatoes hotBake them in their skins, peel and cut them while they are still too hot to hold comfortably, then hit them with the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Warm potato absorbs vinaigrette; cold potato repels it and the salad tastes flat no matter how much mayonnaise goes in.
"Shrimp tails"This means the peeled tail meat of cooked shrimp, not the shells or the fan. Small to medium shrimp, poached in salted water for two to three minutes until just opaque, are right; reserve the best-looking dozen whole for the decoration.
Blanching the oystersShucked oysters need only 30 to 60 seconds in their own strained liquor or in simmering salted water, lifted out the moment the edges ruffle. Anything approaching a full minute past that and they turn to rubber, which no amount of mayonnaise disguises.
Truffles in white wineThe recipe calls for truffles cooked in white wine, an ingredient priced out of most kitchens. Preserved truffle peelings warmed briefly in dry white wine give the aroma; failing that, leave them out and add a little more shrimp rather than substituting truffle oil, which reads as artificial against the vinaigrette.
Maceration, then drain hardFifteen to twenty minutes is enough for the seasoning to penetrate. Drain each element thoroughly before folding in the mayonnaise, or the free vinegar and oil will thin the sauce and the salad will weep in the bowl.
Tarragon mustardA mustard made up with tarragon vinegar, of the type sold now as Dijon a l'estragon. Dijon mustard plus a teaspoon of tarragon vinegar and a little chopped fresh tarragon is a close reading. Use it sparingly; it is a seasoning for the mayonnaise, not a second sauce.
The mayonnaiseRecipe No. 606 is a classic hand-beaten yolk-and-oil emulsion, uncooked. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, make it with pasteurized eggs or use a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice.
Yield and serviceThe original gives no quantities. A workable balance is roughly equal volumes of potato and shrimp with about half that of oysters; a pound of potatoes and a pound of shrimp will serve six as a first course. Chill it, but serve within a couple of hours of mixing, as the oysters toughen and the potato firms up in the refrigerator.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopaedic record of the food he had been serving to the city's wealthy for decades, and its salad chapters are largely a catalogue of French compositions renamed for statesmen, singers and regular customers. The name Mirabeau is often said to honour the revolutionary orator, the Comte de Mirabeau; it belongs to a family of French garnishes, most of them involving anchovy, tarragon and olives, and the tarragon mustard here may well be the thread that connects this dish to that tradition. The combination of oysters, shrimp and warm potato bound with mayonnaise suggests the nineteenth-century salade russe family, in which cooked ingredients rather than leaves make up the salad, decorated on top with the finest pieces held back for the purpose. The presence of truffles, and the assumption that a kitchen would have them on hand cooked in white wine, is a fair measure of who was eating at Delmonico's.