No. 2655

Potato Salad in Border with Truffles

Salade de Pommes de Terre en Bordure aux Truffes

For a plain potato salad put some fresh boiled and sliced potatoes into a bowl, season them with salt and pepper, oil, vinegar and chopped fine herbs.

For a Bordered Salad with Truffles, have some carrots and turnips sliced one inch long by three-quarters wide; take out pieces with a three-eighth inch column tube, and put them to cook in salted water; when done drain them, and set on the center of each piece of carrot and turnip one asparagus top an inch and three-quarters long; range them crown-shaped, intercalating the carrots and turnips, and set some chopped jelly around. Garnish the center with the potato salad dressed dome-shaped; cover the potatoes with round slices of truffle and then serve.

← No. 2654 Hot Potato Salad Vegetable Salads — Cooked & Raw No. 2656 Oyster Plant Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two recipes in one entry: a plain French potato salad, and a composed centerpiece built around it. The salad itself is a five-minute job; everything else is knife work and arrangement.

Dress the potatoes warmRanhofer says "fresh boiled and sliced," and the word doing the work is fresh. Warm potatoes absorb oil and vinegar; cold ones sit in it. Use a waxy variety so the slices hold their edges under the truffle.
Fine herbs"Chopped fine herbs" is fines herbes: chervil, chives, parsley and tarragon, chopped together. If chervil is unavailable, weight the mix toward chives and parsley and keep the tarragon restrained.
Column tubeA 3/8-inch round cutter — a small plain pastry tube used as a punch, or a metal apple corer of that diameter. Cut the carrot and turnip into slabs an inch by three-quarters, then punch the discs from them.
Blanching the rootsCarrot and turnip discs want to be tender enough to eat but firm enough to stand up in the border. Salted water, a few minutes, then drain and cool spread out so they do not steam soft.
Chopped jellyThis is savory aspic — clarified meat or poultry stock set firm, then chopped with a wet knife into glittering fragments. It is decoration and seasoning both, and it will slump at room temperature, so build the plate cold and serve it promptly.
TrufflesRanhofer means black truffle sliced thin on a plane; in nineteenth-century American kitchens these were frequently the preserved French kind. Preserved truffles in jars are the practical substitute; truffle oil is not, since the whole point here is the round black slices reading as a pattern.
AssemblyMound the potato salad in the center — a small bowl or ring inverted onto the dish gives a clean dome — then shingle truffle slices over it. Set the carrot and turnip discs around the base in alternating order, each capped with an asparagus tip standing upright, and scatter the chopped jelly between them.
YieldNo quantities are given anywhere in the entry. As a first course or buffet dish, figure about 2 lb of potatoes and roughly two dozen border pieces for eight.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked in more than thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house style exactly: a homely dish placed at the center of an architectural garnish. Bordure means the border itself, the ring of cut vegetables that frames the mound; the technique of punching roots into uniform discs and standing asparagus tips in them belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of cold buffet work, where a dish was judged first by the plate and only then by the fork. Truffles appear throughout the book — black slices laid over a pale dome, visible from across the dining room. The plain potato salad in the first sentence is left unadorned, and Ranhofer's willingness to print it that way before dressing it up is part of what makes the book useful.