No. 2641

Norwegian Salad

Salade a la Norvegienne

For this salad have one pound of salted anchovies (sardels), soak them in cold water for two hours, and then wipe them with a cloth to remove the white skin covering them; cut off the fillets, pare the ends either on one side or the other, and split them across in two. (Herrings may be used instead of anchovies.) Cut into quarter-inch squares some boiled potatoes, boiled celery root, boiled and pickled beetroot, raw russet apples, and roasted tenderloin of beef, having half a pound of each kind, also half a pound of minced cabbage blanched for fifteen minutes, and then drained and cooled; put all these into a bowl, season highly with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, and mix together thoroughly. Range the pieces in a salad bowl, garnish the edge and inside of the bowl with a row of well-drained pickled oysters, about three dozen in all, and cover with a jellied mayonnaise (No. 613); inside of this row of oysters make another one of olives stuffed with anchovy butter (No. 569); divide the surface in quarters, and on one quarter lay chopped hard-boiled egg-white, on the next quarter some finely chopped chervil and chives, the third quarter filled with hard-boiled egg-yolks, and the last quarter with chopped beetroot. Decorate the oysters with slightly blanched tarragon leaves dipped in jelly, and lay between each olive a thin slice of pickled cucumber, and stick in the center a finely pared bunch of white celery, previously laid in cold water to curl nicely.

← No. 2640 Mirabeau Salad Cooked Salads No. 2642 Oyster Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen

A composed showpiece salad from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, built to be looked at before it is eaten. The construction is the point: everything is diced, dressed and mounded, then the surface is treated as a quartered canvas.

Start the anchovies earlySalt-packed anchovies (the "sardels" of the text) still need the full two-hour cold soak, with a change or two of water, or the finished bowl will be inedibly salty. Modern oil-packed fillets are already desalted and filleted; use about 6 oz of them and skip the soaking and skinning entirely.
Scale and yieldHalf a pound each of potato, celery root, beet, apple, beef and cabbage is roughly three pounds of dressed salad before garnish. This serves twelve to sixteen as a first course, which is the scale Ranhofer worked at. Halving it works, but keep the garnish proportions or the quartered top loses its effect.
Celery root and cabbageCelery root means celeriac, peeled and boiled until just tender, then diced; it discolours quickly, so acidulate the water. Fifteen minutes is a long blanch for minced cabbage by modern standards; the recipe gives no reason for it, though it will take the raw edge off.
Russet applesA firm, dry, tart-sweet apple that holds its shape and does not weep. Any russet is ideal; otherwise a Braeburn or Cox. Dice it last and toss it straight into the dressing so it does not brown.
Season before you buildThe oil-and-vinegar seasoning happens in the mixing bowl, not at the table, and the instruction to "season highly" is meant literally — the mass is bland root vegetables under a blanket of jellied mayonnaise. Taste and correct before anything is mounded, because there is no fixing it afterwards.
Jellied mayonnaiseNo. 613 is mayonnaise slackened with liquid aspic so it sets on the surface. In a modern kitchen, bloom about a teaspoon of powdered gelatine per cup of mayonnaise in a little cold stock, warm it just to dissolve, whisk it in and coat while it is still pourable. It must go on cool but fluid; too warm and it splits the mayonnaise.
Pickled oystersThree dozen shop-bought pickled or smoked oysters, drained thoroughly on paper, do the job. Wet oysters will bleed brine into the jellied coating and streak it.
Anchovy butter and the curled celeryNo. 569 is simply pounded anchovy worked into softened butter; pipe it into pitted green olives. The celery heart genuinely does curl if pared thin and left in ice water for an hour — an old garde-manger trick that still works.
Assemble cold, serve coldBuild the bowl no more than a couple of hours ahead and keep it refrigerated. The jelly needs the cold to hold, and a salad containing cooked beef, oysters and mayonnaise should not sit out at room temperature.

A Little History

Salade à la Norvégienne belongs to the family of Northern European composed salads that French kitchens absorbed and formalised in the nineteenth century — the same root as Russian salad and the Scandinavian sillsallad, in which pickled fish, beetroot, potato and apple are diced small and bound together. The Norwegian label gestures at the herring tradition, though names of the type "à la Norvégienne" are not reliable evidence of where a dish came from; Ranhofer's parenthetical permission to substitute herring for anchovy at least keeps that tradition in view. Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his complete working record; salads like this one, requiring a garde-manger cook, a stocked larder and a long assembly, were buffet and banquet work rather than family food. The quartered surface — egg white, herbs, egg yolk, beetroot — is a standard nineteenth-century decorating scheme, the same logic that produced the ringed and banded aspics of the period, and it tells you that these salads were carried into the room whole and admired before a spoon touched them.