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Radishes
Select two bunches of fine, round, red, sound and rather small radishes. Pare them nicely and leave on each radish two of the prettiest leaves. Cut away the roots, and also a little of the peel around the roots. Place them in cold water and wash well. Nicely arrange them on a flat dish so that they meet toward the centre, the green leaves lying outward. Serve with chopped ice over them.
A dressing-the-plate instruction rather than a cooked dish, and the whole thing turns on cold water and cold service. Radishes go limp and pithy within an hour of leaving the ice.
- Two bunchesBunch size varies, but a market bunch of round red radishes commonly runs somewhere around a dozen roots, so perhaps two dozen or so radishes, enough for a small table as a relish. A modern 8-10 oz supermarket bag is roughly comparable.
- "Pare them nicely"Here this means trimming and tidying, not skinning. The red peel is the point of the dish; what comes off is the tail, the last bit of skin around it, and any blemish or coarse spot.
- Keep two leavesOnly worth doing with radishes bought in bunch with tops attached, which usually means a farmers' market. Bagged radishes come topped. Leaves should be crisp and unyellowed, and they benefit from a separate rinse since grit lodges at the crown.
- The cold water soakThe recipe calls for washing, but a spell in cold or iced water also firms radishes that have gone slightly flexible. Anything genuinely spongy or hollow at the centre will not recover and should be discarded.
- Chopped iceIn the period this meant ice shaved or broken from a block. Crushed ice from a machine works, but drain the melt or the dish floods; a shallow bowl of ice with the radishes arranged on top, rather than buried, holds better at the table.
- What goes with itThe book leaves it bare, as was usual for a relish course served alongside olives and celery. Butter and salt are a long-standing accompaniment to raw radishes.
- TimingAssemble shortly before serving; radishes and their leaves do not hold well once dressed.
Raw radishes with salt were one of the fixed items of the American and European relish course, the small cold assortment of olives, celery, salted nuts and pickles that opened a formal dinner from roughly the 1870s through the 1920s. That is why a book of international cookery bothers to give instructions for something that requires no cooking: the skill being taught is presentation, and the elaborate arrangement of trimmed roots pointing inward with their leaves fanned out was often said to be the mark of a competent kitchen. The chopped ice is a period marker too, signalling a household with an icebox and a regular delivery of block ice, which was ordinary in cities and still a luxury in much of the countryside. The small round red radish itself is a fast, cool-season crop long grown in kitchen gardens across Europe and Asia, and its appearance at table in early spring was generally taken as one of the first signs of the season's produce.