No. 2652

Potato and Beetroot Salad

Salade de Pommes de Terre et Betteraves

Cut some cold boiled potatoes in three-sixteenths inch slices, also some cooked and pickled beetroots; remove twenty-four rounds from each of these, using a one-inch diameter vegetable cutter, and range them crown-shaped, one overlapping the other, intercalating the beets and the potatoes, both previously seasoned. Fill the hollow in the center with finely cut, seasoned lettuce, romaine or escarole, and cover with a layer of very thick mayonnaise (No. 606); decorate the summit with anchovy fillets and tarragon leaves; surround the border with quartered hard-boiled eggs.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the work is in the knife and the arrangement, not the cooking. Read it as a plating diagram with a short ingredient list attached.

"Previously seasoned" is the hingeThe potato and beet rounds are meant to be dressed before they are built into the ring, most likely with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, though Ranhofer does not spell it out here. Skip that step and the mayonnaise sits on bland discs; the whole dish depends on the vegetables being seasoned individually.
Slice thicknessThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm — thick enough that the rounds hold their edge when overlapped, thin enough to eat cleanly. A mandoline set just under 1/4 inch is the easy route.
The one-inch cutterA plain round cutter or the wide end of a piping tip works. The recipe gives no quantities, only the count: twenty-four rounds of each, which will take a couple of potatoes and a couple of beets depending on their girth; save the trim for another salad rather than wasting it.
"Intercalating"Simply alternating: beet, potato, beet, potato around the ring, each overlapping the last like shingles, forming a crown with an open center.
Potato choiceUse a waxy variety — fingerling, red-skinned, or a firm yellow. Russets crumble under a cutter and go mealy once dressed. Boil whole in the skin, cool completely, then peel and slice.
Pickled beetrootsJarred pickled beets are a fair substitute for the house-pickled beets the book assumes, though they are usually sweeter; rinse and drain them, and cut the vinegar in your dressing accordingly.
Mayonnaise No. 606His mayonnaise is a hand-whisked yolk-and-oil emulsion. "Very thick" matters here because it must sit as a layer on the lettuce without slumping into the ring — stiff enough to hold a spoon mark.
Assemble latePickled beets bleed. Dress and cut them separately, blot them, and build the crown no more than half an hour before serving or the potatoes turn pink and the mayonnaise streaks.
YieldTwenty-four rounds of each makes a single platter; figure roughly six to eight as a first course or side.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and this salad shows the house style plainly: familiar ingredients, cheap ones at that, cut to a fixed dimension and arranged into architecture. The crown of overlapping rounds with a filled center belongs to the same nineteenth-century French service that gave us the timbale and the bordure, where a salad was expected to arrive as a constructed object on a platter rather than heaped in a bowl. Beetroot and potato together is much older and much humbler — a staple pairing across northern and eastern Europe, where both keep all winter in a cellar — and versions of it turn up in German, Scandinavian and Russian cooking of the period. What Delmonico's added was the mayonnaise, the anchovy, and the twenty-four-of-each precision that told a diner where they were eating.