No. 2643

Salmon Salad

Salade de Saumon

Cook some slices of salmon; when cold separate the meat in flakes. Mince some celery very fine, place it in a salad bowl with the salmon over it; season with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, mixed in another vessel and thrown over it. Pour over some ravigote mayonnaise sauce (No. 612), decorate the top with tarragon leaves, lobster coral, quartered hard-boiled eggs and fanciful cut of truffles.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the salmon is dressed lightly, then masked with a green mayonnaise and garnished. The order of operations is the whole dish.

Cook the salmon gentlyThe recipe says only "Cook some slices," which in this book would normally mean poaching; salted water or a court bouillon, held just below a simmer until the flesh is opaque at the centre, suits the purpose. Cool it, then drain and flake; salmon cooked to dryness will not hold together as flakes, it will crumble to shreds.
Dress before you maskThe oil, vinegar, salt and pepper are mixed separately and poured over the celery and fish first; the mayonnaise goes on top as a coating. Skip the vinaigrette step and the salad tastes only of mayonnaise. The recipe gives no quantities; a conventional three-to-one oil and vinegar dressing is a reasonable starting point.
Ravigote mayonnaiseNo. 612 is the book's ravigote mayonnaise, a mayonnaise coloured and flavoured with green herbs of the ravigote family — chervil, tarragon, chives, parsley, with watercress or spinach commonly used for colour. Blanched herbs squeezed dry and pounded to a paste, folded into the mayonnaise a spoonful at a time, will give the effect: pale green and pourable enough to mask, not stiff.
Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral red on cooking. It is only present seasonally and rarely available separately now; cooked and sieved, it was used as a red garnish and thickener. Paprika or finely diced cooked lobster meat stands in for the colour, though not the flavour.
Truffles"Fanciful cut" means slices stamped out with small aspic cutters into crescents, diamonds and stars — decoration, not seasoning. A single black truffle goes a long way here; preserved truffle peelings are the cheaper period-appropriate option.
CeleryMinced very fine means brunoise-fine, not sliced. Use the pale inner ribs; the outer stalks are too stringy to disappear into the salad the way this dish intends.
Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; scaled to about a pound of cooked salmon and two or three ribs of celery it will serve four to six as a first course. Assemble shortly before serving and keep it cold — the masking sauce dulls and weeps if it sits.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is a fair sample of how that kitchen thought about cold food: a plainly cooked base, a sauce to mask it, and a garnish assembled in the manner of a mosaic. The cross-references — to oyster salad on one side, Parisian salad on the other, and to sauce No. 612 in the middle — are the book's real architecture, since Ranhofer expected a professional brigade with the sauces already standing by. Ravigote, from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, names a family of sharp herb preparations that appear both hot and cold in nineteenth-century French cookery; the green mayonnaise version was a standard partner for cold fish. Lobster coral and cut truffles as garnish belong to the same decorative vocabulary as chaud-froid and aspic work, a style that dominated hotel and restaurant service on both sides of the Atlantic until well into the twentieth century.