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Salad, Hocart
Cut into square pieces one ounce smoked salmon, six anchovies in oil, two cold, boiled potatoes, one ounce Swiss cheese, six vinegar pickles, the perfect white of a stalk of celery, one small, very sound, peeled and cored apple and the tender part of a small head of romaine. Place all these articles in a salad bowl, flavour with three tablespoons good claret, toss the ingredients well for a minute, let rest for five minutes. Season with four tablespoons of dressing, thoroughly mix, and at the last moment add two tablespoons mayonnaise, mix again and serve.
A composed salad built in the Delmonico manner: everything cut to the same small dice, marinated briefly in red wine, then dressed twice. The order of operations is the whole point.
- The claret step is not optionalThe wine goes on alone and sits for five minutes so the potato and apple absorb it before any oil seals them. Skip it and the salad is just a chopped plate with mayonnaise on it. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or any lean, unsweetened red.
- "Four tablespoons of dressing"The kind is unspecified here; most likely a plain French dressing of the sort the book uses elsewhere, on the order of three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper. Nothing creamy, since the mayonnaise arrives separately.
- Vinegar picklesCornichons or small sour gherkins, not sweet bread-and-butter pickles. Six of them is a lot of acid against one ounce of salmon, so taste before adding the full amount of dressing.
- Uniform diceThe original says only "square pieces" and gives no size; a small dice, matched across the ingredients, is the evident intent, celery and romaine ribs included.
- ApplePeel and cut it near the end and get it into the claret promptly; the acidity of the wine will slow browning. A firm variety holds its shape better than a mealy one under two rounds of mixing.
- Swiss cheeseEmmental or Gruyere, cut in dice rather than shredded, so it reads as a distinct element and does not clump in the mayonnaise.
- Mayonnaise at the last momentMixed in only enough to coat, as the recipe directs. Added earlier, it risks being thinned by the wine and dressing already in the bowl.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; the quantities suggest a small first-course salad for two, or four smaller portions. Best eaten at once, as the dressed romaine will wilt.
Filippini's The International Cook Book collects the kind of cooking practised in the great American hotel and restaurant kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century, where a cook worked from a repertoire of hundreds of named dishes and salads were routinely titled after patrons, colleagues or proprietors. "Hocart" is almost certainly one such surname, though the person behind it is not documented in the book itself, and attributions of this kind were often little more than a compliment paid across the dining room. The construction is thoroughly French: a salade composée of matched dice, marinated first in wine so the starchy elements take on flavour before fat is introduced, then finished with mayonnaise in a way that resembles a salade russe. The mixture of smoked salmon, anchovy, cheese and pickle marks it as an hors d'oeuvre salad meant to open a long meal rather than a side dish.