A book, a taper, and a cup
Of country wine, divinely sup?
Over your hot meats you cannot linger; if alone with them, and read you must, a common newspaper, opened at the day's despatches, best serves your purpose; else, your gravies and sauces congeal into a horrid white mess upon your plate, and tepid is every unsavoury morsel your fork carries to your mouth. But over any one of the "salad clan"—lettuce or tomato, beans or potato, as fancy prompts—you can revel at leisure in your Balzac, your Heine, your Montaigne, which, surely, it would be desecration to spread open by the side of the steaming roast or the prosaic bacon and eggs. There has always seemed one thing lacking in Omar's Paradise: a salad, he should have bargained for with his Book of Verses, his Jug of Wine, and Loaf of Bread "underneath the Bough."
Far behind has the Continent left Great Britain in the matter of salads. To eat them in perfection you must cross the Channel—as, indeed, you must in the pursuit of all the daintiest dishes—and travel still farther than France. The French will give you for breakfast a bowl of Soissons, for dinner a Romaine, which long survive as tender memories; even the humble dandelion they have enlisted in the good cause. With the Italian you will fare no less well; better it may be, for, with the poetic feeling that has disappeared for ever from their art and architecture, they fill the salad bowl at times with such delicate conceits as tender young violet leaves, so that you may smell the spring in the blossoms at your throat, while you devour it in the greens set before you. But in Germany, though there may be less play of fancy in the choice of materials, there is far greater poetry in the mixing of them. As an atonement for that offence against civilisation, the midday dinner, the Germans have invented a late supper that defies the critic: the very meanest Speise-Saal is transfigured when the gaslight falls softly on the delicious potato or cucumber or herring salads of the country, flanked by the tall slim glasses of amber Rhenish wine. But, excelling Germany, even as Germany excels France, Hungary is the true home of the salad. It would take a book to exhaust the praise it there inspires. To die eating salad on the banks of the Danube to the wail of the Czardas—that would be the true death! What, however, save the ideals realised, is to be effected in a land where tomatoes are as plentiful as are potatoes in Ireland?
The Briton, it must be admitted, has of late progressed. Gone is the time when his favourite salad was a horror unspeakable: an onion and a lettuce served whole, chopped up by himself, smothered in salt and pepper, and fairly sluiced with vinegar. To understand the full iniquity of it, you must remember what an excess of vinegar the stalwart Briton was equal to in those days, now happily past. An imperial pint, Mr Weller's friend, the coachman with the hoarse voice, took with his oysters without betraying the least emotion. As benighted, smacking no less of the Dark Ages, is the custom of serving with cheese a lettuce (of the long crisp species known as cos in the cookery books), cut ruthlessly in halves. You are supposed to dip the leaves into salt, and afterwards return thanks with a grateful heart. Many there are who will still eat lettuce in this fashion with their tea; the curious student of evolution can point to it as a survival of the old barbarism; to the mustard and cress or cucumber sandwiches which have replaced it, as a higher phase of development.
But, though these sorry customs still survive here and there, even as superstitions linger among ignorant peasants, British eyes are opening to the truth. The coming of the salad in England marks the passing of the Englishman from barbarous depth to civilised heights. Has he not exchanged his old-love Frith for Whistler, and has he not risen from G. P. R. James to George Meredith? Not a whit less important in the history of his civilisation is his emancipation from that vile, vinegar-drenched abomination to the succulent tomato, the unrivalled potato, well "fatigued" in the "capacious salad-bowl."
Of every woman worthy of the name, it is the duty to master the secret of the perfect salad, and to prepare it for her own—and man's—greater comfort and joy in this life, and—who knows?—salvation in the next. This secret is all in the dressing. It is easy enough to buy in the market, or order at the greengrocer's a lettuce, or a cucumber, or a pound of tomatoes. But to make of them a masterpiece, there's the rub. Upon the dressing and "fatiguing" success depends. The mission of the lettuce, the resources of the bean were undreamed of until the first woman—it must have been a woman!—divined the virtue that lies in the harmonious combination of oil and vinegar. Vinegar alone and undiluted is for the vulgar; mixed with oil it as much surpasses nectar and ambrosia as these hitherto have been reckoned superior to the liquors of mere human brewing. Of mayonnaise nothing need as yet be said; it ranks rather with sauces, irreproachable when poured upon salmon, or chicken, or lobster—upon the simpler and more delicate salads it seems well-nigh too strong and coarse. The one legitimate dressing in these cases is made of vinegar and oil, pepper and salt, and, on certain rare occasions, mustard.
As with sauces, it is simple to put down in black and white the several ingredients of the good dressing. But what of the proportions? What of the methods of mixing? In the large towns of the United States where men and women delight in the pleasures of the table, are specialists who spend their afternoons going from house to house, preparing the salads for the day's coming great event. And perhaps, in the end, all mankind may see advantages in this division of labour. For only the genius born can mix a salad dressing as it should be mixed. Quantities of pepper and salt, of oil and vinegar for him (or her) are not measured by rule or recipe, but by inspiration. You may generalise and insist upon one spoonful of oil for every guest and one for the bowl—somewhat in the manner of tea-making—and then one-third the quantity of vinegar. But out of these proportions the Philistine will evolve for you a nauseating concoction; the initiated, a dressing of transcendental merit.
As much depends upon the mixing as upon the proportions. The foolish pour in first their oil, then their vinegar, and leave the rest to chance, with results one shudders to remember. The two must be mixed together even as they are poured over the salad, and here the task but begins. For next, they must be mixed with the salad. To "fatigue" it the French call this special part of the process, and indeed, to create a work of art, you must mix and mix and mix until you are fatigued yourself, and your tomatoes or potatoes reduced to one-half their original bulk. Then will the dressing have soaked through and through them, then will every mouthful be a special plea for gluttony, an eloquent argument for the one vice that need not pall with years.
One other ingredient must not be omitted here, since it is as essential as the oil itself. This is the onion—