French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [85]
Arrange a quartered lettuce in your salad bowl. Add 2 hard-boiled eggs, cut in half, 2 very firm quartered tomatoes, not more than half a dozen anchovy fillets and 8 or 10 black olives, and if you like them, a few capers. Only when the salad is about to be eaten, mix it with the dressing, made from the best fruity olive oil you can lay hands on, tarragon vinegar, salt, pepper, a crushed clove of garlic. It is up to you to choose the other ingredients: tunny fish, cooked french beans, raw sliced red peppers, beetroot, potatoes, artichoke hearts. It depends what is to come afterwards.
SALADE NIÇOISE (2)
Tunny fish in oil, the flesh of tomatoes, diced anchovy fillets. Seasoning of tarragon, chervil and chopped chives, with or without mustard.
ESCOFFIER’S version
SALADE NIÇOISE (3)
Ingredients: Young artichoke hearts in quarters, black olives, raw sweet peppers, quartered tomatoes, anchovy fillets.
Seasoning: Olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard, fines herbes.
HEYRAUD: La Cuisine à Nice
SALADE NIÇOISE (4)
Escudier12 has yet another version. This salad, he says, which is a delicious summer hors-d’œuvre, is not served in a salad bowl, but in a flat round or oval dish.
Cut very firm tomatoes in slices and take out the seeds. Salt lightly. Arrange the slices in a dish. On top of the tomatoes lay some anchovy fillets. Strew with little lozenges of sweet green pepper and with black olives. Moisten with olive oil and vinegar, and pepper lightly. You can also sprinkle the salad with chopped basil leaves and decorate the border of the dish with slices of hard-boiled egg.
PIMENTS FARÇIS
MARINADED AND STUFFED PEPPERS
‘Choose very small green sweet peppers, no larger than a thumb, make an incision in the side, extract the seeds, and put them to soak in vinegar for 20 days. At the end of this time, take them out, dry them, and through the incision stuff them with the following mixture:
An onion finely chopped with stoned black olives, a few anchovy fillets and a handful of capers. The proportions are 5 parts of olives to 1 of capers, 1 of anchovies, and 1 medium-sized onion.
Arrange the little stuffed peppers in a jar and cover them with oil.’
HEYRAUD: La Cuisine à Nice
LA SALADE LYONNAISE
This purely local Lyonnais hors-d’œuvre consists of several different meats each seasoned with an oil, vinegar, shallot and parsley dressing and served in separate dishes or bowls. The composition may vary slightly but the various components will be chosen from the following: pigs’ and sheep’s trotters cut into chunks, thinly sliced calf’s head, ox muzzle and boiled beef; there may also be some cervelas sausage, sliced and served with a mayonnaise. There are two distinct types of cervelas sausage, as I have explained elsewhere in this volume, and the one served with the salade lyonnaise is that variety which is lightly smoked and rather resembles a frankfurter in texture, although it is a much larger sausage.
Although not exactly what one might call a refined dish, the salade lyonnaise is excellent food of a rough kind, and very cheap if prepared in quantity. I would welcome it myself if it were occasionally to be offered in English restaurants as an alternative to the everlasting potted shrimps and indifferently made pâté maison.
BŒUF EN SALADE
BEEF SALAD
Here is a recipe for a very simple cold dish made on a large scale, sufficient for a dish at a buffet supper party for about twenty people. It is only an extension of the salad made regularly in French households with the boiled beef from the pot-au-feu, but it makes very good party food. It looks attractive, the meat is in manageable pieces, the sauce makes it sufficiently moist without being too runny, and it has plenty of character without being outlandish.
Ingredients are about 4 lb. of stewing