SAL′ADS are generally made of esculent vegetables, either singly or mixed, chosen according to taste or time of year, and ‘dressed’ with oil, vinegar, and salt, and sometimes also with mustard and other condiments. Sliced boiled egg is a common addition.
Sydney Smith’s recipe for salad dressing:—
To make this condiment your poet begs
The powdered yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes passed through kitchen-sieve
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole;
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon
(Distrust the condiment that bites too soon);
But deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
And, lastly, o’er the flavoured compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
Oh! green and glorious! Oh! herbaceous treat!
’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his finger in the salad bowl;
Serenely full the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.”[142]
[142] The poet has inadvertently ignored the oil and vinegar.
Another recipe for salad dressing:—Yolk of two eggs; table salt, 1⁄4 oz.; salad oil, 4 oz.; mustard, 1⁄2 oz.; best vinegar, 6 oz.; isinglass, 1 dr.; soluble cayenne, 10 grams. (‘Phar. Jour.’)
Cold meat, poultry, and game, sliced small, with some cucumber or celery, and a little onion or chopped parsley, or, instead of them, some
pickles, make a very relishing salad. Fish are also employed in the same manner.
Mr C. J. Robinson, writing to ‘Nature’[143] on our salad herbs, says:—“There is, perhaps, no country in the world so rich as England in native materials for salad making, and none in which ignorance and prejudice have more restricted their employment. At every season of the year the peasant may cull from the field and hedgerow wholesome herbs which would impart a pleasant variety to his monotonous meal, and save his store of potatoes from premature exhaustion. Besides there can be no question that in hot seasons a judicious admixture of fresh green food is as salutary as it is agreeable. Much has been said lately about the advantage which the labouring man would derive from an accurate acquaintance with the various forms of fungus; he has been gravely told that the Fistulina hepatica is an admirable substitute for beef-steak, the Agaricus gambosus for the equally unknown veal cutlet.
[143] August 18th, 1870.
“But deep-seated suspicion is not easily eradicated, and there will always be a certain amount of hazard in dealing with a class of products in which the distinctions between noxious and innocuous are not very clearly marked.