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Salads, Sauces, and Pickles
"To make this condiment, your poet begs The powdered yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through the kitchen sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onions atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half suspected, animate the whole; Of mordant mustard, add a single spoon; Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But, deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault To add a double quantity of salt; Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown, And twice with vinegar, procured from town; And lastly, o'er the flavoured compound toss A magic soupcon of anchovy sauce.
O, green and glorious! O, herbaceous treat! "Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat; Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul, And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl; Serenely full, the epicure would say, 'Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."
A salad dressing set out in rhyming couplets, with the proportions buried in the verse. Read the numbers out of it first: two hard yolks, two sieved potatoes, one spoon mustard, two spoons salt, four spoons oil, two spoons vinegar, a touch of onion and a dash of anchovy.
- The hinge: sieve while warmThe hinge: sieve to a paste -- The dressing's character comes from potato and yolk pushed through a sieve into a smooth paste. Warm potato passes through the sieve more easily than cold; work it no more than you must, as overworking the starch makes it gluey.
- What size is a spoonThe verse does not say. A tablespoon for the oil and vinegar gives a sensible 2:1 ratio; treating the salt spoon as a tablespoon does not, so start with a teaspoon of salt and taste up.
- Two spoons of salt"A double quantity of salt" is a lot by modern reckoning, especially alongside bottled anchovy essence or anchovy paste. Salt at the end rather than the start.
- Oil from LuccaLucca in Tuscany was a byword for fine table olive oil in nineteenth-century Britain and America, and "Lucca oil" was commonly used as a trade name for good salad oil. Any decent fruity olive oil answers.
- Mordant mustardBest read as English mustard powder, sharp and hot, rather than the mild prepared kind. A level teaspoon of powder is a workable reading of "a single spoon"; the poem's line about the condiment that "bites so soon" may be read as a warning against overdoing it.
- Onion atoms"Half suspected" suggests grated onion or onion juice rather than chopped. A quarter of a small onion grated fine, or a teaspoon of its expressed juice, is about right.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled anchovy condiment of the kind still sold in Britain; sauces of this sort are ancestors of the Worcestershire type rather than offshoots of it. Anchovy paste thinned with a little of the vinegar, about half a teaspoon, gives the same salted-savoury lift.
- Yield and keepingTwo sieved potatoes plus the yolks and six spoons of liquid make a generous cupful or more, enough for a large bowl of greens. The potato base means it will not keep; make it the hour you serve it, and thin with a little extra vinegar if it stiffens.
These lines are the salad-dressing verse traditionally attributed to Sydney Smith (1771–1845), the Anglican clergyman, Edinburgh Review founder and dinner-table wit whose conversation was quoted for the rest of the century. The verses circulated in letters and memoirs before they reached cookbooks, and Victorian and American compilers, including the Toronto ladies behind The Home Cook Book, reprinted them as a bit of literary garnish among the plainer salad instructions. The dressing itself is a cooked-yolk-and-potato mixture rather than a mayonnaise. The final line, "Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day," outlived the recipe and is still quoted on its own.