Edward Spencer

CHAPTER XIV SALADS AND CONDIMENTS "Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite."

Roman salad—Italian ditto—Various other salads—Sauce for cold mutton—Chutnine—Raw chutnee—Horse-radish sauce—Christopher North’s sauce—How to serve a mackerel—Sauce Tartare—Ditto for sucking pig—Delights of making Sambal—A new language.

It has, I hope, been made sufficiently clear that neither water-cress nor radishes should figure in a dressed salad; from the which I would also exclude such “small deer” as mustard and cress. There is, however, no black mark against the narrow-leaved Corn Salad plant, or “lamb’s lettuce”; and its great advantage is that it can be grown almost anywhere during the winter months, when lettuces have to be “coddled,” and thereby robbed of most of their flavour.

Instead of yolk of egg, in a dressing, cheese may be used, with good results, either cream cheese—not the poor stuff made on straws, but what are known as “napkin,” or “New Forest” cheeses—or Cheddar. Squash it well up with oil and vinegar, and do not use too much. A piece of cheese the size of an average lump of sugar will be ample, and will lend a most agreeable flavour to the mixture.

Roman Salad

Lucullus and Co.—or rather their cooks—had much to learn in the preparation of the “herbaceous meat” which delighted Sydney Smith. The Romans cultivated endive; this was washed free from “matter in the wrong place,” chopped small—absolutely fatal to the taste—anointed with oil and liquamen, topped up with chopped onions, and further ornamented with honey and vinegar. But before finding fault with the conquerors of the world for mixing honey with a salad, it should be remembered that they knew not “fine Demerara,” nor “best lump,” nor even the beet sugar which can be made at home. Still I should not set a Roman salad before my creditors, if I wanted them to have “patience.” An offer of the very smallest dividend would be preferable.

Italian Salad.

The merry Italian has improved considerably upon the herbaceous treat (I rather prefer “treat” to “meat”) of his ancestors; though he is far too fond of mixing flesh-meat of all sorts with his dressed herbs, and his boiled vegetables. Two cold potatoes and half a medium sized beet sliced, mixed with boiled celery and Brussels sprouts, form a common salad in the sunny South; the dressing being usually oil and vinegar, occasionally oil seule, and sometimes a Tartare sauce. Stoned olives are usually placed atop of the mess, which includes fragments of chicken, or veal and ham.

Russian Salad.

This is a difficult task to build up; for a sort of Cleopatra’s Needle, or pyramid, of cooked vegetables, herbs, pickles, etc., has to be erected on a flat dish. Carrots, turnips, green peas, asparagus, French beans, beetroot, capers, pickled cucumbers, and horse-radish, form the solid matter of which the pyramid is built.

Lay a stratum on the dish, and anoint the stratum with Tartare sauce. Each layer must be similarly anointed, and must be of less circumference than the one underneath, till the top layer consists of one caper. Garnish with bombs of caviare, sliced lemon, crayfish, olives, and salted cucumber; and then give the salad to the policeman on fixed-point duty. At least, if you take my advice.

Anchovy Salad.

This is usually eaten at the commencement of dinner, as a hors d’oeuvre.

Some shreds of anchovy should be arranged “criss-cross” in a flat glass dish. Surround it with small heaps of chopped truffles, yolk and white of hard-boiled eggs, capers, and a stoned olive or two. Mix all the ingredients together with a little Chili vinegar, and twice the quantity of oil.

The mixture is said to be invaluable as an appetiser; but the modest oyster on the deep shell—if he has not been fattened at the bolt-hole of the main sewer—is to be preferred.

Cooked vegetables, for salad purposes, are not, nor will they ever be, popular in England, Nine out of ten Britains will eat the “one sauce” with asparagus, in preference to the oiled butter, or plain salad dressing, of mustard, vinegar, pepper, salt, and oil; whilst ’tis almost hopeless to attempt to dissuade madame the cook from smothering her cauliflowers with liquefied paste, before sending them to table. Many a wild weed which foreign nations snatch greedily from the soil, prior to dressing it, is passed by with scorn by our islanders, including the dandelion, which is a favourite of our lively neighbours, for salad purposes, and is doubtless highly beneficial to the human liver. So is the cauliflower; and an eminent medical authority once gave out that the man who ate a parboiled cauliflower, as a salad, every other day, need never send for a doctor. Which sounds rather like fouling his own nest.

Fruit Salad.

This is simply a French compÔte of cherries, green almonds, pears, limes, peaches, apricots in syrup slightly flavoured with ginger; and goes excellent well with any cold brown game. Try it.

Orange Salad.

Peel your orange, and cut it into thin slices. Arrange these in a glass dish, and sugar them well. Then pour over them a glass of sherry, a glass of brandy, and a glass of maraschino.

Orange Sauce.

Cold mutton, according to my notions, is “absolutely beastly,” to the palate. More happy homes have been broken up by this simple dish than by the entire army of Europe. And ’tis a dish which should never be allowed to wander outside the servants’ hall. The superior domestics who take their meals in the steward’s room, would certainly rise in a body, and protest against the indignity of a cold leg, or shoulder. As for a cold loin—but the idea is too awful. Still, brightened up by the following condiment, cold mutton will go down smoothly, and even gratefully:—

Rub off the thin yellow rind of two oranges on four lumps of sugar. Put these into a bowl, and pour in a wine-glass of port, a quarter pint of dissolved red-currant jelly, a teaspoonful of mixed mustard—don’t be frightened, it’s all right—a finely-minced shallot, a pinch of cayenne, and some more thin orange rind. Mix well. When heated up, strain and bottle off.

But amateur sauces should, on the whole, be discouraged. The writer has tasted dozens of imitations of Lea and Perrins’s “inimitable,” and it is still inimitable, and unapproachable. It is the same with chutnee. You can get anything in that line you want at Stembridge’s, close to Leicester Square, to whom the writer is indebted for some valuable hints. But here is a recipe for a mixture of chutnee and pickle, which must have been written a long time ago; for the two operations are transposed. For instance, the onions should be dealt with first.

Chutnine.

Ten or twelve large apples, peeled and cored, put in an earthenware jar, with a little vinegar (on no account use water) in the oven. Let them remain till in a pulp, then take out, and add half an ounce of curry powder, one ounce of ground ginger, half a pound of stoned raisins, chopped fine, half a pound moist sugar, one teaspoonful cayenne pepper, one tablespoonful salt. Take four large onions (this should be done first), chop very fine, and put them in a jar with a pint and a half of vinegar. Cork tightly and let them remain a week. Then add the rest of the ingredients, after mixing them well together. Cork tightly, and the chutnine will be ready for use in a month. It improves, however, by keeping for a year or so.

Raw Chutnee

is another aid to the consumption of cold meat, and I have also seen it used as an accompaniment to curry, but do not recommend the mixture.

One large tomato, one smaller Spanish onion, one green chili, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Pulp the tomato; don’t try to extract the seeds, for life is too short for that operation. Chop the onion and the chili very fine, and mix the lot up with a pinch of salt, and the same quantity of sifted sugar.

I know plenty of men who would break up their homes (after serving the furniture in the same way) and emigrate; who would go on strike, were roast beef to be served at the dinner-table unaccompanied by horse-radish sauce. But this is a relish for the national dish which is frequently overlooked.

Horse-radish Sauce.

Grate a young root as fine as you can. It is perhaps needless to add that the fresher the horse-radish the better. No vegetables taste as well as those grown in your own garden, and gathered, or dug up, just before wanted. And the horse-radish, like the Jerusalem artichoke, comes to stay. When once he gets a footing in your garden you will never dislodge him; nor will you want to. Very well, then:

Having grated your horse, add a quarter of a pint of cream—English or Devonshire—a dessert-spoonful of sifted sugar, half that quantity of salt, and a tablespoonful of vinegar. Mix all together, and, if for hot meat, heat in the oven, taking care that the mixture does not curdle. Many people use oil instead of cream, and mix grated orange rind with the sauce. The Germans do not use oil, but either make the relish with cream, or hard-boiled yolk of egg. Horse-radish sauce for hot meat may also be heated by pouring it into a jar, and standing the jar in boiling water—“jugging it” in fact.

Celery Sauce,

for boiled pheasant, or turkey, is made thus:

Two or three heads of celery, sliced thin, put into a saucepan with equal quantities of sugar and salt, a dust of white pepper, and two or three ounces of butter. Stew your celery slowly till it becomes pulpy, but not brown, add two or three ounces of flour, and a good half-pint of milk, or cream. Let it simmer twenty minutes, and then rub the mixture through a sieve.

The carp as an item of food is, according to my ideas, a fraud. He tastes principally of the mud in which he has been wallowing until dragged out by the angler. The ancients loved a dish of carp, and yet they knew not the only sauce to make him at all palatable.

Sauce for Carp.

One ounce of butter, a quarter pint of good beef gravy, one dessert-spoonful of flour, a quarter pint of cream and two anchovies chopped very small. Mix over the fire, stir well till boiling, then take off, add a little Worcester sauce, and a squeeze of lemon, just before serving.

Christopher North’s Sauce.

This is a very old recipe. Put a dessert-spoonful of sifted sugar, a salt-spoonful of salt, and rather more than that quantity of cayenne, into a jar. Mix thoroughly, and add, gradually, two tablespoonfuls of Harvey’s sauce, a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a tablespoonful of lemon juice, and a large glass of port. Place the jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and let it remain till the mixture is very hot, but not boiling. If bottled directly after made, the sauce will keep for a week, and may be used for duck, goose, pork, or (Christopher adds) “any broil.” But there is but one broil sauce, the Gubbins Sauce, already mentioned in this work.

Sauce for Hare.

What a piece of work is a hare! And what a piece of work it is to cook him in a laudable fashion!

Crumble some bread—a handful or so—soak it in port wine, heat over the fire with a small lump of butter, a tablespoonful of red-currant jelly, a little salt, and a tablespoonful of Chili vinegar. Serve as hot as possible.

Mackerel is a fish but seldom seen at the tables of the great. And yet ’tis tasty eating, if his Joseph’s coat be bright and shining when you purchase him. When stale he is dangerous to life itself. And he prefers to gratify the human palate when accompanied by

Gooseberry Sauce,

which is made by simply boiling a few green gooseberries, rubbing them through a sieve, and adding a little butter and a suspicion of ginger. Then heat up. “A wine-glassful of sorrel or spinach-juice,” observes one authority, “is a decided improvement.” H’m. I’ve tried both, and prefer the gooseberries unadorned with spinach liquor.

Now for a sauce which is deservedly popular all over the world, and which is equally at home as a salad dressing, as a covering for a steak off a fresh-run salmon, or a portion of fried eel; the luscious, the invigorating

Sauce Tartare,

so called because no tallow-eating Tartar was ever known to taste thereof. I have already given a pretty good recipe for its manufacture, in previous salad-dressing instructions, where the yolks of hard-boiled eggs are used. But chopped chervil, shallots, and (occasionally) gherkins, are added to the Tartare arrangement; and frequently the surface is adorned with capers, stoned olives, and shredded anchovies.

In the chapters devoted to dinners, no mention has been made of the sucking pig, beloved of Charles Lamb.[8] This hardened offender should be devoured with

Currant Sauce:

Boil an ounce of currants, after washing them and picking out the tacks, dead flies, etc., in half a pint of water, for a few minutes, and pour over them a cupful of finely grated crumbs. Let them soak well, then beat up with a fork, and stir in about a gill of oiled butter. Add two tablespoonfuls of the brown gravy made for the pig, a glass of port, and a pinch of salt. Stir the sauce well over the fire. It is also occasionally served with roast venison; but not in the mansions of my friends.

What is sauce for Madame Goose is said to be sauce for Old Man Gander. Never mind about that, however. The parents of young Master Goose, with whom alone I am going to deal, have, like the flowers which bloom in the spring, absolutely nothing to do with the case. This is the best

Sauce for the Goose

known to civilisation:

Put two ounces of green sage leaves into a jar with an ounce of the thin yellow rind of a lemon, a minced shallot, a teaspoonful of salt, half a ditto of cayenne, and a pint of claret. Let this soak for a fortnight, then pour off the liquid into a tureen; or boil with some good gravy. This sauce will keep for a week or two, bottled and well corked up.

And now, having given directions for the manufacture of sundry “cloyless sauces”—with only one of the number having any connection with Ala, and that one a sauce of world-wide reputation, I will conclude this chapter with a little fancy work. It is not probable that many who do me the honour to skim through these humble, faultily-written, but heartfelt gastronomic hints are personally acquainted with the cloyless

Sambal,

who is a lady of dusky origin. But let us quit metaphor, and direct the gardener to

Cut the finest and straightest cucumber in his crystal palace. Cut both ends off, and divide the remainder into two-inch lengths. Peel these, and let them repose in salt to draw out the water, which is the indigestible part of the cucumber. Then take each length, in succession, and with a very sharp knife—a penknife is best for the purpose—pare it from surface to centre, until it has become one long, curly shred. Curl it up tight, so that it may resemble in form the spring of a Waterbury watch. Cut the length through from end to end, until you have made numerous long thin shreds. Treat each length in the same way, and place in a glass dish. Add three green chilies, chopped fine, a few chopped spring onions, and some tiny shreds of the Blue Fish of Java. Having performed a fishless pilgrimage in search of this curiosity, you will naturally fall back upon the common or Italian anchovy, which, after extracting the brine and bones, and cleansing, chop fine. Pour a little vinegar over the mixture.

“Sambal” will be found a delicious accompaniment to curry—when served on a salad plate—or to almost any description of cold meat and cheese. It is only fair to add, however, that the task of making the relish is arduous and exasperating to a degree; and that the woman who makes it—no male Christian in the world is possessed of a tithe of the necessary patience, now that Job and Robert Bruce are no more—should have the apartment to herself. For the labour is calculated to teach an entirely new language to the manufacturer.