No. 2664

German Salad with Croutons

Salade Allemande aux Croutons

Blanch in boiling water one pound of sauerkraut for five minutes, refresh and add to it one pound of red cabbage previously pickled in vinegar. Cut up the sauerkraut to make the pieces shorter, and lay them in a bowl with three ounces of very fine chopped onions, blanched and refreshed; add to this one ounce of grated horseradish and a tablespoonful of chopped chervil. Season with salt, pepper, six tablespoonfuls of olive oil and two of vinegar, and serve in a salad bowl with a ring of round croutons on top made of fragments of puff-paste (No. 146), one and a quarter inches thick, cut with a round pastry-cutter, then cooked in a very slack oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cold sauerkraut-and-red-cabbage salad from Ranhofer's kitchen, dressed simply and finished with baked puff-paste rounds. Nothing here is difficult, but two directions need translating: the treatment of the kraut and the odd description of the croutons.

Blanch, then squeezeThe five-minute blanch and cold refresh knock back the sourness and soften the harshness of barrel kraut. Drain it thoroughly and press out the water afterward, or the oil and vinegar will slide off and pool at the bottom of the bowl.
"Previously pickled in vinegar"This assumes red cabbage already pickled and waiting in the larder: shredded cabbage steeped in vinegar. Commercial pickled red cabbage works directly; plain raw red cabbage will not give the same result, since it contributes none of the acid the dressing is balanced against.
Three ounces of onionAbout half a cup finely chopped, which is assertive against two pounds of cabbage. Blanching and refreshing them, as directed, removes the raw bite and is worth doing rather than skipping.
HorseradishOne ounce grated is several tablespoons of loosely grated root. Fresh root is what is meant; if using prepared horseradish from a jar, drain it and consider cutting the vinegar in the dressing slightly, since the jar already carries acid.
ChervilStill sold fresh in some markets and easy to grow, but it goes limp and flavorless when dried. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the standard stand-in.
The dressing ratioSix tablespoons oil to two of vinegar is a straight 3:1, and it is calculated against cabbage that is already acidic. Dress it, then taste before adding more vinegar.
The croutons are pastry, not breadThese are rounds of puff paste — the recipe says "fragments," i.e. offcuts, in a kitchen where trimmings accumulated — cut with a pastry cutter and baked. The "one and a quarter inches" is ambiguous: as a thickness it would be absurd for puff paste, and it may well refer instead to the diameter of the cutter. Roll the scraps thin.
A very slack ovenAround 275-300F. The low heat dries the rounds crisp and keeps them pale rather than puffing and browning them, so they hold their shape as a ring on top of a wet salad.
Yield and serviceTwo pounds of cabbage serves six to eight as a side. Dress and chill the salad, but arrange the croutons only at the moment of serving — they soften within minutes of touching the dressing.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of a great American restaurant kitchen, and its salad chapter ranges widely over European regional styles rendered in French professional idiom. In French kitchen usage "allemande" was attached to a variety of unrelated dishes; here it points to the German pantry — sauerkraut, pickled red cabbage, horseradish — and says more about how Paris and New York classified such food than about any single German dish. The puff-paste croutons suggest restaurant rather than domestic cooking: a kitchen turning out vol-au-vents and patty cases generated pastry trimmings, and the recipe itself calls for "fragments" of paste. Ranhofer's cross-reference to No. 146 for the paste is typical of the book, which was written for cooks who already had the foundations at hand.