No. 2673

Lettuce and Anchovy Salad

Salade de Laitue aux Anchois

This is made with well washed and dried lettuce by shredding it up finely; season and lay it in a salad bowl, cover with a mayonnaise sauce (No. 606), decorated with fillets and anchovies, hard-boiled yolks and whites of eggs, and some finely chopped herbs. A lettuce salad may be served garnished with hard-boiled eggs and plenty of herbs. Lettuce salad may also be seasoned with sweet or sour cream instead of oil.

← No. 2672 Lettuce Salad, Plain Green Salads No. 2674 Monk's Beard Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen

A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the lettuce is dressed, masked with mayonnaise, then decorated. Ranhofer assumes you have his sauce recipes to hand, so a few blanks need filling.

Sauce No. 606That cross-reference is Ranhofer's mayonnaise: egg yolks, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper worked cold. Any standard mayonnaise stands in, thinned with a spoonful of cream or vinegar so it drapes the leaves rather than sitting on them in a lump.
Raw yolksA from-scratch mayonnaise is uncooked egg and stays that way in this dish. Pasteurized eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise avoid the issue, and either should be kept cold until the salad goes to table.
"Season" means before the sauceThe lettuce is salted and peppered before the mayonnaise goes over it, and the closing line's "instead of oil" implies an oil dressing at this stage, though Ranhofer does not spell it out. Skip the seasoning and the interior of the salad tastes of nothing.
Shred and dry properlyFine shredding is a chiffonade: stack the leaves, roll them, cut across in thin ribbons. The leaves must be bone dry or the mayonnaise slides off and pools; a spinner then ten minutes on a towel in the refrigerator does it.
AnchoviesSalt-packed anchovies are the likely intention, and they need rinsing, filleting and a soak; oil-packed fillets can be blotted and used as they are. The recipe says only "decorated", so a lattice or spokes over the sauce is one option.
The eggsYolks and whites are separated after hard-boiling and used as distinct garnishes, the yolk pressed through a sieve, the white cut in fine dice or thin strips. Mixed together they read as chopped egg and lose the point.
Herbs"Finely chopped herbs" is unspecified; the usual fines herbes mix of chervil, chives, tarragon and parsley is the obvious reading. Chop them at the last moment and use them generously, as the second variation makes clear.
The cream versionSweet cream means fresh, unsoured cream; sour cream is what the name says. Either takes the place of the oil, with seasoning and, if you like, vinegar or lemon. It gives a lighter salad than the mayonnaise-masked one.
YieldTwo large heads of romaine or Boston lettuce, a dozen anchovy fillets, three hard-boiled eggs and about a cup of mayonnaise serve six as a salad course. Assemble within the half hour before serving.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in French-service order, which is why a salad this simple arrives numbered, cross-referenced and sitting among a run of other lettuce salads. The masking of a green salad with mayonnaise and then decorating it with anchovy, sieved egg and herbs belongs to the grand-restaurant habit of treating salad as a composed dish to be looked at, related to the platters generally traced back to the mid-century salade à la russe and its descendants. Anchovy and hard-boiled egg were common pantry ornaments of the period: anchovies kept well, both were cheap, and both gave a plain leaf enough salt and richness to sit alongside a roast. The closing note that lettuce may be dressed with sweet or sour cream instead of oil is a reminder that cream dressings were not an American innovation of the twentieth century but an accepted alternative in a French professional kitchen.