The Art of Entertaining

by M. E. W. Sherwood

After, or before, lettuce comes the fragrant celery, always an appetizer. Then the tomato, a noble fruit as sweet in smell as Araby the blest, which makes an illustrious salad. Its medicinal virtue is as great as its gastronomical goodness. It is the friend of the well, for it keeps them well, and the friend of the sick, for it brings them back to the lost sheep-folds of hygeia.

There are water-cress and dandelion, common mustard, boiled asparagus, and beet root, potato salad, beloved of the Germans, the cucumber, most fragrant and delicate of salads, a salad of eggs, of lobsters, of chickens, sausages, herrings, and sardines. Anything that is edible can be made into a salad, and a vegetable mixture of cold French beans, boiled peas, carrots and potato, onion, green peppers, and cucumber, covered with fresh mayonnaise dressing, is served ice cold in France, to admiration.

To learn to make a salad is the most important of qualifications for one who would master the art of entertaining.

Here is a good recipe for the dressing:—

Two yolks of eggs, a teaspoonful of salt, and three of mustard,—it should have been mixed with hot water before using,—a little cayenne pepper, a spoonful of vinegar; pound the eggs and mix well. Common vinegar is preferred by many, but some like tarragon vinegar better. Stir this gently for a minute, then add two full spoonfuls of best oil of Lucca.

"A sage for the mustard, a miser for the vinegar, a spendthrift for the oil, and a madman to stir" is the old saw. Add a teaspoonful of brown sugar, half a dozen little spring onions cut fine, three or four slices of beet root, the white of the egg, not cut too small, and then the lettuce itself, which should be torn from the head stock by the fingers.

Some French salad dressers say fatiguez la salade, which means, shake it, mix it, and bruise it; but the modern arrangement is to delicately cover the leaves with the dressing, and not to bruise them. This is an old-fashioned salad.

An excellent salad of cold boiled potatoes cut into slices about an inch thick, may be made with thin slices of fresh beet root, and onions cut very thin, and very little of them, with the same dressing, minus the sugar.

Francatelli speaks of a Russian salad with lobster, a German salad with herrings, and an Italian salad with potatoes; but these come more under the head of the mayonnaises than of the simpler salads.

The cucumber comes next to lettuce, as a purely vegetable salad, and is most desirable with fish. Dr. Johnson declared that the best thing you could do with a cucumber, after you had prepared it with much care and thought, was to throw it out of the window; but Dr. Johnson, although he could write Rasselas and a dictionary, knew nothing about the art of entertaining. He was an eater, a glutton, a gourmand, not a gourmet. How should he dare to speak against a cucumber salad?