FoodNetArchive

Practical gastronomy and culinary dictionary

1892

Page 33

Presented as published in 1892. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
with much fuller and finer flavour than the preceding, especially when the leaves are streaked. The Roman lettuce is sometimes served with odoriferous herbs, hard eggs are often added to the seasoning. The Roman lettuce is in season from May to the end of autumn. Besides these there are hotch-potch salads made en ynacedoine in a variety of roots and vegetables, such as French beans, haricots blancs, lentils, small onions, beetroot, saxifrage, or goat's beard, potatoes, carrots, artichoke bottoms, asparagus tops, gherkins, sliced anchovies, soused tunny, olives, &c. There are salads also of meat, fish, and game. A salade a Vitalienne is composed of cold fowl cut up in pieces and served with anchovies and dressed salad. True connoisseurs of the vegetable luxury wipe the separated leaves of the lettuce one by one with care. They break the foliage for the salad-bowl, never cutting it, and debate and commingle the component parts of the dressing with anxiety and scrupulous care. A good salad can be concocted, of course, out of fifty ingredients, from nettle-tops and dandelion leaves through cold potato and beetroot to the lettuce and the endive, which are salad plants par excellence. It is in dressing, however, that genius is most exhibited. The broad rule has been well laid down in the familiar formula, that to compound a proper garnish for a bowl of salad demands " a sage for the salt, a miser for the vinegar, a prodigal for the oil, and a maniac for the Other and difficult problems must of course NOTES ON SALADS AND SALAD DRESSING 85 arise ; but, from whatever side we examine the question of this seasonable dish, everything depends upon oil — good, pure, pellucid, nut-flavoured oil. That of the olive is to be preferred, of course, and for choice the Provence oil, as distinguished from the so-called *' Lucca." Home- made salad dressing, it goes without saying, is better than that bought ready-made. A few not generally known items on the subject may be acceptable. First, you can boil your dressing, and so keep it, tightly bottled, for some time. Take three eggs, one tablespoon- ful each of sugar, oil, and salt, a small tablespoonful of mustard, a cupful of milk, and one, or less, of vinegar. Stir the oil, salt, mustard, and sugar in a bowl until perfectly smooth, add the yolk of the eggs, well beaten, then the vinegar, and lastly the milk. Place the bowl in a basin of boiling water, and stir the contents till of the consistency of custard. For aspic mayonnaise dressing melt a cupful of savoury jelly, then put it in a bowl, which place in a basin of ice water, mix with a quarter cup of vinegar, one tablespoonful of sugar, one scant of mustard, one teaspoonful of salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Beat the jelly with a whisk, and when it thickens add the oil and vinegar little by little, lastly a little lemon -juice, beating it all the time. This dressing ought to be very white, and will serve as an excellent salad dressing. We may live without poetry, music, and art ; We may live without conscience, and live without heart ; We may live without friends ; we may live without books ; But civilised man cannot live without cooks. We may live without books — what is knowledge but grieving : We may live without hope — what is hope but deceiving ? We may live without love — what is passion but pining