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Barcelone Salad
Thoroughly wipe three nice, good-sized, red tomatoes, then cut each one in eight even sections, place in a salad bowl, add one sliced and seeded sound green pepper. Remove outer leaves, wash well and thoroughly drain on a cloth a fresh head of chicory, detach leaves from the root and cut in two-inch pieces, add to the bowl with two cold, hardboiled eggs cut in quarters. Season with four tablespoons dressing. Mix all well together and serve.
A straightforward composed salad that needs almost no translation, though two of its terms have shifted meaning since the book was written.
- Chicory means friséeChicory probably means curly endive -- in American usage of this period a "head of chicory" most often meant curly endive or frisee rather than the tight pale Belgian chicon or red radicchio, though the words chicory and endive were used inconsistently at the time. Buy a full ragged head, discard the tough dark outer leaves as directed, and use the paler heart.
- The dressing is a vinaigretteThe dressing is presumably a vinaigrette -- the recipe simply calls for "dressing," pointing to a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing with salt and pepper made up elsewhere. Four tablespoons is enough to gloss this quantity of leaves without pooling; add it at the last moment or the chicory wilts.
- Green pepper"sound" here means unblemished and firm. The pepper is a green (unripe) bell pepper, sliced into rings or strips after seeding. Nothing hot is intended.
- Drying mattersDraining the washed chicory on a cloth is the step that makes the dressing cling rather than slide off. A salad spinner does the same job faster, but the leaves still want a few minutes on a towel.
- The eggsHard-boiled and fully cold, or the yolks crumble into the dressing and muddy it. Quartered lengthwise, they sit on the surface rather than being tossed to pieces.
- TomatoesEight sections from a good-sized tomato gives slim wedges. Salt them lightly on their own for a few minutes and tip off the liquid if you want the dressing to stay sharp.
- YieldServes four as a side salad, two as a light lunch.
Salads named for Spanish and Catalan cities were a fixture of grand-hotel menus in the early twentieth century, when a kitchen's international repertoire was part of its selling point; this book belongs squarely to that tradition. The combination here — tomato, green pepper, egg and a bitter leaf under an oil-and-vinegar dressing — reflects what a French-trained chef of the period might well have taken for Spanish flavour, tomato and green pepper being ingredients often associated with the Peninsula. Whether anything resembling it was actually eaten in Barcelona is another question: names of this kind are often said to have been conferred in Paris, London or New York kitchens rather than borrowed from the place itself.