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Salad, Tyrolienne
Place in a bowl a half pint cold, cooked string beans, two medium sliced, pickled beetroots, one finely sliced onion, two cold, hard-boiled eggs finely chopped up, and two medium peeled and cored apples cut in small square pieces. Toss well in bowl, pour in four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A cold composed salad of beans, beets, apple and egg, held together by a dressing the recipe assumes you already have on hand. Nothing here is difficult; the work is in getting the components properly cold and dry before they meet.
- Half pint of beansA half pint is one cup, measured as cooked beans rather than raw. Roughly 6 oz of trimmed green beans, boiled until just tender and then cooled, will get you there.
- The dressing is left to youThe recipe simply says "dressing" and assumes you have one. A plain French dressing — three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper — suits it. Four tablespoons is enough to coat this quantity without pooling; make it sharp, since the apple and beet are both sweet.
- Pickled beetrootSliced pickled beets from a jar are the direct equivalent. Drain them well and blot dry, or the whole bowl turns magenta within a minute of tossing.
- OnionOne whole onion finely sliced is aggressive by current taste. A small shallot or a few rings of red onion, rinsed in cold water and dried, gives the bite without dominating.
- AppleUse a firm tart variety — Granny Smith, Braeburn — and cut it last, tossing the dice in a little of the dressing's vinegar so they hold their colour.
- Order of assemblyToss the beans, beets and onion with the dressing first, then fold in the apple and chopped egg at the end. Egg turns to paste if it is stirred through a dressed salad more than necessary.
- YieldServes four as a side, two as a light lunch. Best assembled shortly before serving; the beans go dull and the apple soft if it sits more than an hour.
"Tyrolienne" signals the Tyrol, the Alpine region straddling what is now western Austria and northern Italy, and in French kitchen shorthand it is generally traced to a garnish of onion, usually fried, together with tomato. The combination here, cooked beans, pickled beet, apple, hard-boiled egg, sour dressing, is squarely in the central European tradition of the cold bean and beet salad, where pickled vegetables carried a household through winter and apple supplied the acidity and sweetness that fresh salad greens could not. Names of this kind were often looser than the recipes, and a garnish or a single ingredient was enough to earn a regional title.