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Russian Salad
Cut into dice 1 cup each of cold chicken, tongue, and fish,--all cooked, of course. Arrange on a dish, in three parts, the tongue in the middle, with a border of 2 carrots, 4 potatoes, and 1 cup of string beans, being careful to keep each distinct, and a dressing over all as above. Before serving, pour a mayonnaise over it, evenly.
RUSSIAN SALAD (without meat.) Cut 8 carrots into dice, 3 raw tomatoes in slices, and chop 1 onion and a handful of watercress. Mix it with 1/2 pint of mayonnaise, add the chopped onion, and pour this over the rest, on a bed of lettuce leaves. Garnish with a tablespoonful of capers, here and there.
Two versions of a composed salad from a period when "Russian salad" meant diced cooked things under mayonnaise, arranged rather than tossed. The instructions assume a cook who already has cold roast meat and boiled vegetables on hand.
- The hinge: keep everything distinctThe dish is built, not stirred. Dice everything to a uniform quarter-inch, chill the components separately, and lay them in bands so the colours stay clean. Mixing first turns it into a grey mass, which is exactly what the recipe is trying to avoid.
- "A dressing over all as above"This points back to a dressing given earlier in the book, which is not reproduced here; in salads of this type it is usually a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing. If so, treat it as a light marinade for the diced vegetables an hour ahead, then blot before the mayonnaise goes on, or the two dressings will slacken into a pool.
- TongueCooked, peeled beef tongue, sold pickled or fresh at some butchers and delis. A cup of thick-cut cooked ham or good salt beef sits in the same place on the plate if tongue is not to be had.
- The fishThe recipe says only "fish", cooked. Firm cold-poached white fish or salmon suits the dish; avoid oily smoked fish, which will dominate the chicken and tongue.
- Quantities and pint sizesHalf a pint of mayonnaise is one cup in American measure; if you are reading a British edition, half an imperial pint is ten fluid ounces. Four potatoes and two carrots means medium ones, boiled and cooled before dicing — roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of potatoes and about four ounces of carrots.
- Carrots in the meatless versionEight carrots diced is a large amount, and the recipe does not say whether they are cooked. Raw diced carrot with raw tomato, onion and watercress reads as intended, but boiled and cooled carrot makes a better-balanced salad and is closer to the first version.
- Raw onionA whole chopped onion under a cup of mayonnaise is assertive by modern standards. A mild sweet onion or a couple of shallots, rinsed in cold water and drained, keeps the bite in proportion.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggHomemade mayonnaise is uncooked egg yolk. Use pasteurized eggs, or a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice, if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three cups of diced meat and fish plus the vegetables will serve roughly six as a first course or four as a lunch; the meatless one about four to six alongside something else.
The name attaches to a family of composed, mayonnaise-bound salads found in nineteenth-century Russian, French and then Anglo-American kitchens — related to what is still called salade russe in France and Olivier in Russia, the latter generally traced to a chef working in Moscow in the 1860s; the direction of influence between the Russian and French traditions is contested, and salade à la russe seems to have developed largely within French professional cooking. What travelled abroad was the idea rather than any fixed formula: diced cooked vegetables, some cold meat or fish, mayonnaise over the top. That flexibility is probably why it turns up so often in books of this period, which appear to have been written for households that cooked large joints and needed dignified ways to use the remains. The careful arrangement in bands, with capers scattered for effect, seems to belong to the same era's taste for salads that were looked at before they were eaten, and the alternative meatless version may reflect the practical reality that a cook might have vegetables and no cold roast at all.