Game Salad
Take equal parts crisp white celery and raw sour apples, chop them fine, sprinkle with a little olive oil and tarragon vinegar; mix well, and dress with mayonnaise. Serve with game.
A two-ingredient salad meant as an accompaniment, not a main dish — the name refers to what it is served with, not what is in it. It comes together in about ten minutes and is best dressed close to serving.
- No game in the game saladThe name refers to what the salad is served with, not what is in it: the recipe's last line is "Serve with game." This is a celery-and-apple relish salad to sit beside roast grouse, venison or duck, cutting the fat and richness.
- Sour applesMeans a firm, tart cooking apple — Granny Smith, Bramley, or a Newtown Pippin if you can find one. A sweet eating apple collapses the balance the dish depends on.
- Chop fine, not grateThe recipe says only "chop them fine"; a small even dice, around a quarter inch, is a practical reading. Grated apple weeps and turns to mush under mayonnaise within minutes.
- BrowningThe oil and vinegar go on before the mayonnaise, which has the incidental benefit that the acid slows oxidation of the cut apple, whether or not that was the intent. Tossing the apple in the dressing as you cut it rather than after everything is chopped will keep it paler.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth buying rather than substituting — plain white wine vinegar loses the anise note that makes this work with game. If you must, steep a few tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week.
- Proportions of dressingNo quantities are given. For about four cups of chopped celery and apple, a tablespoon of oil, two teaspoons of vinegar and roughly half a cup of mayonnaise is a workable starting point; the mayonnaise should coat, not swamp.
- MayonnaiseA period cook would have made it fresh with raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is the practical choice; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and serve the same day.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities; on the proportions suggested above it would serve roughly four to six as a side. Dress within half an hour of serving -- the salt in the mayonnaise draws water out of the celery and the whole thing goes slack if it stands.
Celery and apple in a creamy dressing is the idea that was fixed in the public mind as Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s. Salads of this type appear in American cookbooks under whatever name suited the menu, and pairing a sharp fruit salad with game follows a much older European habit of serving roast birds and venison with tart fruit: rowan and crabapple jellies, cranberry, currant. Celery itself was still something of a luxury in this period, sold blanched and served upright in tall cut-glass vases on the table, and the recipe specifies "crisp white" — the pale, tender blanched heart rather than the green outer ribs.