Home › Sallets and Salads › Sallets and Salads: Distrust
Sallets and Salads: Distrust
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown, And twice with vinegar procured from town; And, lastly, o'er the flavour'd compound toss A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat! 'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat; Back to the world he 'd turn his fleeting soul, And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl.
Beneath the verse is a workable dressing built on a ratio: one spoon mustard, two salt, four oil, two vinegar, plus anchovy. The proportions are the whole of the method, so read them as measurements rather than ornament.
- The ratioTwo parts oil to one part vinegar is the operative instruction, with mustard at half the vinegar. If you use a tablespoon as the "spoon", that is 4 tbsp oil, 2 tbsp vinegar, 1 tbsp mustard — enough to dress a generous bowl of leaves.
- "A double quantity of salt"Two spoons of salt against four of oil is far more than modern palates accept. Start with a scant teaspoon and correct at the end, remembering the anchovy brings its own.
- MustardIn an English kitchen of this date this means dry mustard powder, not a jarred paste. Powder also does the emulsifying work that holds the oil and vinegar together when you toss.
- Oil from LuccaLucca in Tuscany was the standard source of good olive oil in the British market through the nineteenth century, sold as "Lucca oil". Any mild, fresh extra-virgin oil answers.
- Vinegar "procured from town"Points to shop-bought vinegar rather than home-made. Use white wine vinegar; malt vinegar will overwhelm the oil.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled English condiment of pounded anchovy, vinegar and spice, still sold, and close kin to Worcestershire sauce. A teaspoon of anchovy paste mashed into the mustard, or two mashed fillets, gives the same effect.
- What the excerpt leaves outThe verse as printed here is a fragment. The fuller poem it comes from also calls for hard-boiled egg yolk and a sieved boiled potato worked into the mustard, which is what turns this from a thin vinaigrette into a creamy dressing. Without them, whisk vigorously and dress at the last moment or it will separate.
- Order of workMustard and salt first, then the vinegar, then the oil in a thin stream, then the anchovy.
These lines are from the salad-dressing verse generally attributed to Sydney Smith (1771 u2013845), the clergyman and wit whose sayings circulated widely in Victorian anthologies; the poem was quoted, misquoted and reprinted in cookery books and household compendia for the better part of a century, which is why it turns up here in a chapter of sallets rather than in a book of verse. Its survival says something about how salad was taught in English households: not as a recipe with weights but as a proportion to be memorised, in the same tradition as the older folk saying u2014 variously reported as Spanish, Italian or Portuguese u2014 about needing a spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar and a madman to toss it. The word sallet, the older English form, had largely given way to salad by this date, and the chapter heading preserving both suggests a compiler conscious of writing in a long line. The anchovy is the English signature u2014 a salted-fish note that is often said to run through British cooking from Roman garum by way of Elizabethan anchovy butter to the bottled sauces of the nineteenth-century store cupboard, though the descent is more popular story than established fact.