Dress a Salad
To have this delicate dish in perfection, the lettuce, pepper grass, chervil, cress, & should be gathered early in the morning, nicely picked, washed, and laid in cold water, which will be improved by adding ice; just before dinner is ready to be served, drain the water from your salad, cut it into a bowl, giving the proper proportions of each plant.
Prepare the following mixture to pour over it: boil two fresh eggs ten minutes, put them in water to cool, then take the yelks in a soup plate, pour on them a table spoonful of cold water, rub them with a wooden spoon until they are perfectly dissolved.
Then add two spoonsful of oil: when well mixed, put in a tea-spoonful of salt, one of powdered sugar, and one of made mustard; when all these are united and quite smooth, stir in two table spoonsful of common, and two of tarragon vinegar; put it over the salad.
Garnish the top with the whites of the eggs cut into rings, and lay around the edge of the bowl young scallions, they being the most delicate of the onion tribe.
*This colonial recipe appear unedited from Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife, 1824. Read more about this historic cookbook’s 200th anniversary here.
Learn all about cooking with Rebecca Suerdick here.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue.
