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Salad, Alsacienne (Plunge three frankfurter)
Plunge three frankfurter sausages into one quart boiling water and boil for six minutes. Remove and let get cold. Then slice into thin slices. Slice also four medium-sized cold boiled potatoes, one medium-sized, sound white onion, six medium, sound pickles and one very small, thoroughly cleaned and well-drained head of lettuce.
Place all these articles in quite a large bowl. Season with four tablespoons salad dressing. Mix well and serve.
A cold sausage-and-potato salad of the Alsatian type, closer to a German Wurstsalat than to anything dressed with mayonnaise. The whole dish depends on the potatoes being cut while still just warm enough to drink up the dressing.
- Dress the potatoes warmThe recipe calls for cold boiled potatoes, but cold, fully set slices absorb almost nothing and the salad tastes dry. If you depart from the instruction, slice the potatoes while still warm and pour a little of the dressing over them before the rest goes in.
- The frankfurtersModern supermarket frankfurters are already fully cooked, so six minutes in boiling water is only reheating and will often split the skins. A three-minute warming, or a coarse-textured smoked sausage sliced straight from the pack, does the job. Look for a real Strasbourg or Vienna-style link rather than a soft hot-dog.
- "Six medium pickles"These are sour cucumber pickles, not sweet gherkins; the salad needs the acid. Six medium pickles is a substantial amount once sliced -- a lot of pickle for four potatoes -- so cut back if you want the potato to lead.
- "Sound white onion""Sound" simply means unblemished and firm. Raw white onion at this quantity is assertive; slicing it paper-thin and rinsing it in cold water for a few minutes keeps the bite without the harshness.
- The salad dressingThe recipe does not say which dressing; a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing suits the dish better than a mayonnaise, though period American "salad dressing" often meant the thicker cooked kind. Four tablespoons is a light hand for this volume; expect to want more, and lean sharp on the vinegar.
- LettuceThe lettuce is a garnish more than a component. Add it at the last moment or it wilts under the dressing.
- YieldServes three to four as a lunch dish, two as a main course. It keeps a day refrigerated, minus the lettuce, and improves for a few hours.
Alsace has passed back and forth between French and German control, and its cooking shows it: this salad is French in its vinaigrette and German in everything else, built on boiled sausage, potato and sour pickle in the manner of a Wurstsalat served in the wine taverns of Strasbourg and Colmar. Dishes labelled "Alsacienne" more usually point to a garnish of sauerkraut with ham or sausage. The book's appearance, gathering regional dishes for an American readership, reflects a period when publishers were selling the cuisines of immigrant communities back to a general readership, and the frankfurter had already been thoroughly naturalised in the United States by then, which made this one of the more approachable foreign salads on offer.