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Carmelite Salad
Cut four cold, hard-boiled eggs in quarters and place in a bowl, with two cold, boiled potatoes, one pickled beetroot cut in small pieces, one finely chopped, medium, white onion, and six small anchovies in oil cut in small pieces. Season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A cold composed salad in the Central European manner, closer to a herring-and-beet salad than to anything dressed with mayonnaise. The whole thing depends on the components being fully cold before they meet.
- "Four tablespoons dressing"The recipe assumes a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing already made up, though it gives no proportions; a seasoned vinaigrette is the usual reading. Four tablespoons is enough to coat this quantity without pooling; add it a spoonful at a time, since boiled potato absorbs dressing unevenly.
- PotatoesUse a waxy variety and boil them in the skin, then peel and dice; floury bakers will collapse into the beetroot. The recipe calls simply for two cold boiled potatoes, and wants them cold before dressing.
- Pickled beetrootVinegar-pickled, not fresh-roasted beet. Drain it well and cut it last, or the entire salad turns uniformly pink.
- Anchovies in oilSix oil-packed fillets, drained, which is roughly half a standard 2 oz tin. If you have only salt-packed anchovies, rinse and soak them 20 minutes first; they will be saltier than oil-packed fillets, so taste before adding further seasoning.
- OnionA medium white or sweet onion, chopped fine. If it is sharp, cover the chopped onion with cold water for ten minutes and drain, which takes the raw bite off without cooking it.
- EggsThe recipe puts the quartered eggs in the bowl with everything else and mixes; turn gently in any case, or the yolks crumble through the dressing. Hard-boiled here means fully set yolks, not the modern jammy centre.
- YieldServes four as a first course or light lunch, two as a main salad. It holds an hour or two in the refrigerator but the potato firms up and dulls, so dress it close to serving.
Dishes named "Carmelite" in nineteenth-century cookery are often said to signal meatless fare, the name traditionally traced to the Carmelite order and its rule of abstinence, though the French culinary "carmelite" is at least as often taken as a colour reference to the brown habit; in the meatless reading the anchovy stands in for meat, as it does across Lenten cooking from Provence to Poland. This particular combination of boiled potato, pickled beet, egg, onion and cured fish is the shared grammar of the Central and Eastern European cold salad, the same set of parts that turns up as Russian vinaigrette salad, Swedish sillsalad and German herring salad. Its appearance in The International Cook Book is characteristic of that volume, which set out to gather national dishes from across Europe for American households and often kept a continental name attached to a very plainly written procedure. Note what the recipe does not say: it assumes a jar of French dressing is already to hand.