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Lamb Salad with Tarragon
Cut away all the meat from leg of lamb left over from yesterday and cut into very thin slices. Place in a bowl, add one very finely sliced small onion, two branches of celery finely sliced and half teaspoon finely chopped tarragon. Season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, two tablespoons oil and one and a half tablespoons of tarragon vinegar. Mix well together and serve.
A leftovers dish with no stated quantity of meat and a dressing balance that reads sharper than most modern palates expect. A few conversions and one adjustment make it work.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. Against half a teaspoon of salt that is unusually peppery; start with half and add to taste.
- How much lambThe meat off a leftover leg is anywhere from one to two pounds. Figure roughly a pound of sliced cooked lamb for the seasonings given, serving three to four as a light lunch.
- Dressing ratioTwo tablespoons oil to one and a half of vinegar is close to equal parts, far sharper than the modern three-to-one. Either accept it as a pickled, brasserie-style salad or pull the vinegar back to two teaspoons.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus extra fresh tarragon is an adequate substitute.
- SlicingVery thin slices cut across the grain are the point; thick chunks of cold roast lamb stay tough and shed the dressing. A cold leg slices far more cleanly than a warm one.
- Let it sitServe is written as immediate, but twenty to thirty minutes at room temperature lets the onion soften and the vinegar penetrate the meat, and takes the chill-hardened fat off the lamb.
- OnionRaw sliced onion can dominate the tarragon. Sliced paper-thin and rinsed briefly in cold water, or swapped for shallot, it will sit more quietly in the dressing.
Cold-meat salads of this kind were a fixture of the thrifty side of professional cookery: the French salade de boeuf, made from yesterday's boiled beef with onion, oil and vinegar, belongs to the same family, and the lamb version simply substitutes what the household happened to have roasted. Tarragon and tarragon vinegar mark it as belonging to the classical French repertoire that dominated American hotel and restaurant kitchens. Nothing here is cooked afresh, the lamb being already roasted; the recipe exists to answer the standing question of what to do with the remains of a leg of lamb.