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Alex. Dumas' Recipe for Salad
Cut into dice cooked white potatoes and beets in equal parts, add half as much raw sliced tomatoes, pickled gherkins, and anchovies, or tunny fish, arrange on a dish with chopped onion and sliced eggs, a French dressing being poured over and all mixed. Add the yolk of an egg blended with a tablespoonful of olive oil and a teaspoonful of French mustard, then serve with a border of lettuce.
A composed salad with no quantities given at all, which is how celebrity recipes were often printed in the 1900s. The proportions are the recipe: equal potato and beet, half as much of everything else.
- A working scaleFor four people: about 12 oz cooked waxy potato and 12 oz cooked beet, diced; 6 oz tomato, 6 oz gherkins, and 6–8 anchovy fillets or a small tin of tuna. One small onion, chopped, and two hard-boiled eggs, sliced.
- Tunny fishTunny is simply tuna, and in period usage it meant oil-packed tuna from a tin or jar. Oil-packed is still the right choice here; water-packed tuna goes dry and stringy against the vinaigrette.
- French dressingIn period usage this is plain oil-and-vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in America today.
- French mustardA smooth, unsweetened French-style mustard, usually taken today to mean Dijon (in British usage of the period it could equally mean the milder Bordeaux type) -- not a grainy moutarde a l'ancienne, which will not blend smoothly into the yolk.
- The finishing sauceThe yolk, oil and mustard beaten together are added last, after the vinaigrette. Whisk them to a thick cream, then slacken with a spoonful of the dressing from the bowl before folding through, or the yolk will seize into lumps.
- Keep the beet apartDiced beet bleeds. Dress it separately and add it at the last moment if you want the potato to stay white; toss everything together early and the salad turns uniformly pink.
- Raw yolkThe finishing sauce is never cooked. Use a pasteurised egg, or omit the yolk and simply whisk the mustard into the oil, if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- SaltAnchovies, tuna and gherkins all carry salt. Season the vinaigrette lightly and taste the finished salad before adding more.
- ServingServe cool rather than chilled, with the lettuce border added just before it goes to table so it does not wilt.
Alexandre Dumas père was as well known among his friends for cooking as for the novels, and he spent the last years of his life on the Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, published posthumously in 1873. He is traditionally said to have made the salad himself at the table, mixing it in front of the company as a piece of theatre, and versions of "Dumas' salad" turn up in later English and American cookbooks, often with widely varying ingredients. What stayed constant was the structure seen here: the beet-and-potato base familiar from Russian and Polish salads, salted fish for depth, and a final enrichment of raw yolk with mustard and oil stirred in at the last moment — essentially a broken mayonnaise used as a seasoning rather than a coating. Its appearance here is in keeping with the period's appetite for recipes attached to famous names.