This is a variety of celery, sometimes known as Dutch celery, a tuber which has a quite peculiar and characteristic flavour. It needs no addition whatever, and is an excellent accompaniment to all meats. Cut it in slices, after boiling it for twelve minutes, and mix carefully with plenty of liquid.
Mashed Potato Salad.
Beat up ordinary mashed potatoes with a little lukewarm weak stock or warm water instead of milk, and no butter. Then dress them with a little chopped chive, oil and vinegar, pepper and salt. This can be endlessly varied with chopped hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, cucumbers, anchovies, &c. This salad comes from that most excellent compendium of quaint conceits, “More Potpourri from a Surrey Garden,” by Mrs. C. W. Earle.
Old-fashioned salads, according to a seventeenth-century cook-book, were more diversified than ours. Among the ingredients of “Grand Sallets of divers compounds” were broom buds, pickled mushrooms, pickled oysters, blew figs, Virginia potato, caperons, crucifix pease, sage, mint, balm, burnet, violet leaves, red coleworts, raisins of the sun, charvel and ellicksander buds. Some of these we know under other names, but “blew figs” and “ellicksander buds” are untraceable. The list has a Rabelaisian smack, and gives one some idea of the crude admixture of flavourings which was acceptable to our forebears.
In a very charming old book, “Travels in England in 1702,” by C. P. Moritz, a Prussian clergyman, the following passage seems quotable: “An English dinner generally consists of a piece of half-boiled, or half-roasted, meat; and a few cabbage leaves boiled in plain water; on which they pour a sauce made of flour and butter. This, I assure you, is the usual method of dressing vegetables in England. The slices of bread and butter which they give you with your tea are as thin as poppy leaves. But there is another kind of bread and butter usually eaten with tea, which is toasted by the fire, and is incomparably good. You take one slice after the other, and hold it to the fire on a fork till the butter is melted, so that it penetrates a number of slices at once; this is called toast.”
Another part of the same book describes the kitchen in a country inn, and gives a picture which seems to describe some old Dutch interior. “I now, for the first time, found myself in one of these kitchens which I had so often read of in Fielding’s fine novels; and which certainly give one, on the whole, a very accurate idea of English manners. The chimney, in this kitchen, where they were roasting and boiling, seemed to be taken off from the rest of the room, and enclosed by a wooden partition, the rest of the apartment was made use of as a sitting and eating room. All round on the sides were shelves with pewter dishes and plates, and the ceiling was well stored with provisions of various kinds, such as sugar-loaves, black puddings, hams, sausages, flitches of bacon, &c.”
A modern Dr. Syntax in search of the picturesque would vainly nowadays look for anything approaching this homely simplicity in any English hostelry. The modern tendency seems all directed towards spurious finery, meretricious decoration, and uncomfortable New Art. The old inns are neglected, and the new hotels merely vulgarly gorgeous. The food is ambitious and basely imitative of bad French models. The advent of the ubiquitous motor car on old country roads, away from the railways, may in time improve matters, and revive, to a certain extent, the extinct glories of the old coaching inns; but as yet there is little, if any, improvement to be marked. In the meanwhile, I would suggest that every travelling motor car be provided with a Chafing Dish, and thus mitigate or improve the dull pretentious meals which the country hotel proprietor thinks proper to provide. The Chafing Dish and the motor car seem made for one another. Will somebody try the combination?
There are just a few more salads which I should like to recommend, premising, however, that they are not altogether orthodox. By this I mean that they are not wholly composed of greenstuffs, but require the addition of extraneous appetisers.
Walnuts and Green Peas.
Boil and blanch a dozen walnuts; break them in halves, mix them with a pint of green peas, cooked and cold, and toss them about in a small quantity of dressing.