No. 2668

Chicory Salad

Salade de Chicoree

Select the chicory heads; having yellow hearts and very fine leaves; cut away all the green and wash the white part, drain and shake well in a napkin or wire basket to remove all the water. Season with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, chervil and tarragon, or, instead of these herbs use a piece of bread-crust after rubbing a clove of garlic over it. This piece of bread is called a capon.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A vinaigrette-dressed salad of blanched chicory hearts, with the French garlic crust that Ranhofer calls a "capon." Two words in it need translating before you shop.

What "chicory" means hereIn a French-trained American kitchen of the 1890s this most likely means chicorée frisée — curly endive, sold today as frisée. Buy heads with pale, tightly furled yellow hearts; the outer green leaves are tough and bitter and the recipe tells you to discard them. Belgian endive (witloof) will also work and needs no trimming.
The caponThis is chapon, a crust of stale bread rubbed hard with a cut clove of garlic and tossed through the salad, then either eaten or discarded. It perfumes the leaves without putting raw garlic in the dressing, and it is the whole point of the second version — do not chop the garlic in instead.
Dry leaves or no dressingThe napkin or wire basket is a salad spinner. Oil will not cling to wet frisée and the water dilutes the vinegar into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl; get the leaves genuinely dry.
Proportions for the dressingRanhofer assumes a cook who knows them. Three parts oil to one of wine vinegar is a common period ratio and still reads correctly; dissolve the salt in the vinegar before adding the oil.
The herbsChervil and tarragon are the classic French salad pair — use them fresh and chopped just before serving, as chervil loses everything when dried. The recipe offers them or the garlic crust, not both.
Dress at the tableFrisée softens once it meets acid. Season and toss immediately before it goes out.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, two good heads of frisée, once the green is cut away, will dress about four as a side salad.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house repertoire of a New York restaurant cooking in French. That shows here: the salad is filed under its French name, the technique is standard Parisian, and the chapon is carried over untranslated in spirit — the English "capon" for a garlic-rubbed crust makes no sense unless you know the French word, and Ranhofer explains it rather than dropping it. The trick is old and generally traced to Provençal and Languedoc practice, where garlic was rubbed on bread rather than cut into the food. Blanched chicory hearts were a winter salad green in a period when little else was available leafy and crisp between November and March; growers earthed up or covered the plants to keep the hearts pale, tender and less bitter, which is exactly why Ranhofer tells the cook to throw the green away.