Home › The World's Kitchen › Salad, Liechtenstein
Salad, Liechtenstein
Place in a bowl (all cold) four tablespoons each cooked green peas and string beans cut in half-inch pieces, a half pint well-drained, cooked asparagus tips, four anchovies in oil cut in very small pieces, four tablespoons cooked flageolets, a tablespoon capers, two small, very finely sliced vinegar pickles and two cold hard-boiled eggs cut in small pieces. Toss well together in bowl, season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A composed vegetable salad in the French style, dressed at the last minute. The only real work is having everything cooked, cooled and thoroughly drained before it meets the bowl.
- Half a pint of asparagusThat is one cup of drained tips, roughly a pound of thin asparagus before trimming. Wet tips will thin the dressing and pool at the bottom of the bowl.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green immature kidney beans, still sold dried and in tins under the same name. Cooked cannellini or navy beans stand in acceptably; canned beans want rinsing and a good dry.
- Vinegar picklesCornichons or small sour gherkins, not sweet pickles. Sliced very fine, they read as seasoning rather than as an ingredient.
- The dressingThe recipe does not specify; a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing, in the region of three parts oil to one vinegar with salt and pepper, suits it. Four tablespoons is a light coating for this volume; hold back on salt, since anchovies, capers and pickles all bring their own.
- AnchoviesThe recipe says four anchovies in oil, cut very small; drain them first. Taste before adding any more salt.
- Everything coldThe instruction "all cold" is not decoration. Warm vegetables slacken the dressing.
- Toss lateDress within a few minutes of serving. Held longer, the vinegar dulls the green beans and peas and the egg breaks up into the vegetables.
- YieldAbout four side servings, or two as a light lunch with bread.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a vast compendium arranged alphabetically by dish. Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, worked in the French professional idiom of his day, and the national labels in the book are often closer to garnish names on a restaurant menu than to anything eaten in the country itself: a salad of diced cooked vegetables bound with dressing belongs to the family of salade russe and mac inity that every trained kitchen of the period turned out. Flageolets, capers and anchovies are Parisian larder items rather than Alpine ones, and Liechtenstein — a principality of some ten thousand people around 1900 — is unlikely to have supplied the recipe. What the entry does record accurately is the late-Victorian and Edwardian taste for cold composed salads served from a bowl, built on the previous day's cooked vegetables and sharpened with salt-cured fish and pickles.