No. 2644

Parisian Salad

Salade Parisienne

Cut in quarter-inch squares some artichoke bottoms, beetroots and celeriac, boiled in water, and some cooked potatoes. Lay these vegetables in a bowl with a sliced, salted and pickled cucumber; add some marinated tunny-fish, season and pour over some good sweet oil. Pass through a sieve six cooked egg-yolks, beat them with a spoonful of olive oil, a tablespoonfuls of mustard and tarragon vinegar. Dress the vegetables, cover them with this sauce, and decorate the top with anchovies, olives, truffles, shrimp tails and a few fanciful cuts of red beef tongue.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a brigade that already knew proportions, so no quantities appear beyond the six egg yolks. Treat this as a formula: equal volumes of the diced vegetables, enough sauce to coat.

Tunny-fishTunny is tuna. "Marinated" here means tuna cooked or preserved in oil with vinegar and aromatics; a good jar of oil-packed tuna, drained and dressed with a little vinegar, stands in exactly.
Sweet oilNineteenth-century menu English for olive oil, mild rather than sweetened. Oil appears twice in the recipe, as "good sweet oil" poured over the vegetables and as "olive oil" in the sauce.
Artichoke bottomsThe trimmed base of a large globe artichoke, boiled until tender in acidulated water. Frozen artichoke bottoms are sold in Middle Eastern groceries; drained canned hearts are a fair substitute, though softer.
CeleriacBoil it whole or in large pieces until just tender, then cool before dicing, or the quarter-inch cubes will collapse. The same applies to the beets and potatoes.
Keep the beets separateDice and dress the beetroot on its own and fold it in at the last moment, otherwise the whole salad turns pink. The recipe gives no instruction on this point.
The yolk sauceSieved hard-boiled yolks beaten with oil, mustard and tarragon vinegar make a thick paste, not a pourable dressing. Loosen it with more vinegar or a spoonful of the vegetable cooking water until it will just coat, and season it firmly.
Red beef tongueCured (hence red) cooked tongue, sold sliced at good delicatessens. Cut it into small diamonds or crescents for the garnish; a mild cured ham serves if tongue is unavailable.
TrufflesA garnish in 1894, a luxury now. Omit them rather than substitute truffle oil, which reads as nothing like sliced black truffle.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities. Built with roughly a pound each of the four vegetables it makes a large bowlful, enough for about eight as a first course. Dress it no more than an hour ahead and keep it cold; the potato absorbs dressing and dulls as it sits.

A Little History

Salade parisienne belongs to the family of composed, mayonnaise- or sauce-bound vegetable salads that French kitchens built in molds and domes through the second half of the nineteenth century, and it sits in The Epicurean directly beside its better-known cousin, the Russian salad at No. 2645. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published the book in 1894 as a full record of the restaurant's repertoire, which is why the entry reads as a specification rather than a household recipe: the diced cubes, the sieved-yolk sauce and the deliberate garnish of anchovy, olive, truffle, shrimp tails and cut tongue are the work of the garde-manger, the cold station whose job was to make a bowl of boiled roots look architectural. The sauce itself, hard yolks worked with oil, mustard and tarragon vinegar, is often said to represent an older way of binding a cold salad, predating mayonnaise.