No. 2676

Water Cress and Apple Salad and Nonpareil [chiffonade] Salad (salade de Cresson aux Pommes d'Arbre et Salade Nonpareil [chiffonade]

Have very clean and green water-cress; season it only when ready to serve with a very little oil, salt, pepper, vinegar and some sour apples cut in slices. Pepper water-cresses are prepared the same.

Nonpareil (Chiffonade) Salad.—Place in the bottom of a bowl some seasoning composed of salt, pepper, oil and vinegar; mix well with a fork. Mince some lettuce very fine, also the same quantity of chicory and celery; dress dome-shaped in the bowl containing the seasoning. Chop up separately the whites and the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, and cut in three-sixteenths of an inch squares the same volume of beets and potatoes. Divide the dome in four equal parts with anchovy fillets, garnish one of these parts with beets, one with the chopped egg-white, one with the chopped yolks, and the last one with the chopped potatoes; bestrew over all finely chopped truffles, parsley, lobster coral, and in the center place a nice Spanish olive.

VEGETABLES(Legumes).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two salads from Ranhofer's green-salad chapter: one almost nothing, one a composed showpiece built to be looked at before it is tossed. Both depend on dressing being present but not yet worked through the leaves.

The title's odd FrenchPommes d'arbre, literally "tree apples" -- is usually read as distinguishing eating apples from pommes de terre, potatoes. The salad is watercress with sliced apple, nothing more exotic.†
Dress at the last momentThe instruction to season watercress "only when ready to serve" is the hinge of the first salad. Cress collapses within minutes of meeting salt and vinegar, and sliced apple browns just as fast, so cut and combine at the table or immediately before carrying it out.
Proportions for the vinaigretteNeither salad gives quantities. Three parts oil to one of good wine vinegar, salt and pepper, is the period standard for a plain green salad and works here; for the apple version keep the vinegar light so it does not fight the fruit.
Sour applesThis means a firm tart cooking or eating apple, not a soft sweet one. Granny Smith, Braeburn or a russet-type apple holds its slice; leave the peel on for color against the cress.
Pepper water-cressProbably an older name for garden cress or peppergrass (Lepidium), the peppery sprout sold today as cress or in salad mixes. Ranhofer says to treat it exactly as watercress.
Chiffonade meant shredded, not the modern ribbonHere chiffonade is vegetables minced or shredded very fine. Lettuce, chicory (curly endive) and celery go in equal volumes, cut fine enough to hold a dome shape when mounded.
Dressing goes under the saladMixing the vinaigrette in the bottom of the bowl and building the dome on top keeps the leaves crisp and the decoration dry until the salad is tossed. The recipe does not say where the tossing happens, only that the seasoning waits at the bottom of the bowl.
Beets and potatoesBoth must be cooked and thoroughly cold before dicing, or they will wilt the greens and bleed. Three-sixteenths of an inch is a small neat dice; keep the beets separate to the last second.
Lobster coral and truffleThe coral is the roe of a hen lobster, which turns brilliant red when cooked and is sieved for garnish; it is rarely available now and paprika or nothing is the practical substitute. Truffle here is decorative only, and the salad reads perfectly well without it.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two hard-boiled eggs and equal volumes of lettuce, chicory and celery set the scale: a single bowl served as a course.

A Little History

Both salads come from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The green-salad section is notably plain — cress and apple is barely a recipe — which may reflect the expectation that a French restaurant salad would be dressed and tossed at the table, leaving the cook's job to end with clean leaves and correctly cut garnish. The nonpareil salad shows the opposite instinct at work: nonpareil means "without equal," and the dish is a piece of dining-room theatre, a dome quartered with anchovy fillets and banded in beet red, egg yellow, egg white and potato, strewn with black truffle and scarlet lobster coral. Composed salads of this kind, arranged in colored sections and destroyed by the first stroke of the salad fork, were a fixture of grand American and European service in the 1880s and 1890s. The lobster coral is the clearest period marker, appearing here as casually as parsley in a kitchen breaking down whole hen lobsters daily.