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Onion and Pepper Salad
(This recipe was obtained from the chef of an exclusive Paris restaurant and is unknown to most people.) Chop 6 green peppers, free from seeds, and 1 large Bermuda onion very, very fine. Add salt, pepper, French mustard, 1/2 pint olive oil and juice of a lemon, mixed with one inch of preserved ginger, cut up fine. Serve on a bed of lettuce leaves ice cold.
A raw chopped salad that stands or falls on the knife work and on how much dressing you actually pour over it. Read the oil quantity before you commit.
- The dressing is far too largeHalf a pint of olive oil is a cup or more, depending on whether the measure is American or Imperial, with only one lemon to cut it — enough dressing for several times this amount of vegetable. Make the full quantity if you like, but dress the salad with a few spoonfuls and keep the rest in a jar for other salads.
- French mustardIn a book of this date "French mustard" means the smooth, wine-sharpened Dijon type, not dry English mustard powder. A rounded teaspoon whisked into the lemon juice before the oil will help the dressing emulsify.
- Preserved gingerThis is most likely stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars, and certainly not fresh root; note that crystallised ginger was also sold as "preserved" at the time. "One inch" of it is roughly a walnut-sized lump, a tablespoon or so once minced. Rinse the syrup off unless you want the salad sweet.
- Bermuda onionA mild, flat, sweet onion. A Vidalia, Walla Walla or any large sweet white onion stands in. A standard yellow cooking onion is too harsh raw; if that is all you have, soak the chopped onion in ice water for ten minutes and drain hard.
- "Very, very fine"The repetition is the whole instruction. Peppers and onion should be reduced to a coarse mince, small enough that no single piece dominates a forkful. Chop by hand — a food processor turns both to water.
- Green peppersSix large bell peppers give a lot of salad. Core, seed and strip the pale ribs, which are the harshest-tasting part.
- Let it sit, then serve coldTwenty to thirty minutes in the refrigerator lets the salt draw juice from the onion and softens its bite. Drain off any pooled liquid before spooning it onto the lettuce, or the leaves collapse.
- YieldAs written, six to eight servings as a side salad.
The claim in the parenthesis — a secret from an exclusive Paris chef — has often been said to be a familiar sales pitch in turn-of-the-century travel cookbooks, which gathered dishes as souvenirs and vouched for them by association rather than by any documented source. The salad itself owes less to Paris than to the vogue for sweet Bermuda onions, shipped to American and British markets in quantity through the nineteenth century and prized precisely because they could be eaten raw. Preserved ginger in syrup was another import staple of the period, arriving in glazed Canton jars and turning up in savoury dishes far more often than modern cooks expect; its sweet heat here does the job that a pinch of sugar or a sweet pepper would do in a later dressing. Serving a chopped salad on a bed of lettuce leaves, ice cold, was itself a mark of the fashionable table when domestic refrigeration was still a matter of the iceman.