Salad Dressing

Today I’d like to share with you a 19th century salad dressing recipe.

Two boiled potatoes strained through a kitchen sieve,
Softness and smoothness to the salad give;
Of mordant mustard take a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon!
Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
True taste requires it and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onion’s atoms lurk within the bowl
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole,
And lastly in the flavoured compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh, great and glorious! Oh, herbaceous meat!
‘Twould tempt the dying Anchorite to eat,
Back to the world he’d turn his weary soul
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl.

More prosaically, here are the ingredients: 1 spoon anchovy sauce, 2 egg yolks, 1 spoon mustard, 4 spoons olive oil, 2 spoons vinegar, half a finely chopped onion, 2 sieved boiled potatoes, pinch of salt. I think it will go well stirred into pasta and served with cold tongue or beef and a green salad.

I was led to Sydney Smith’s recipe after being shown (by another Smith) a recent article in The Times. Sydney’s a chap about whom I was profoundly ignorant. You may know that his idea of heaven was eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. He also lamented, “my living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon”.

There was a more serious side to Smith and his gift was to put over his radical agenda in a persuasive and entertaining style, giving him much in common with fellow clergyman, Jonathan Swift. He advocated Catholic emancipation in Peter Plymley’s Letters. Other causes he espoused were the abolition of slavery and the advancement of education for women.

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool. 

But now persecution is good, because it exists; every law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies the passions from whence it sprang, we call the wisdom of our ancestors: when such laws are repealed, they will be cruelty and madness; till they are repealed, they are policy and caution.

Peter Plymley’s Letters (1808)

There is much to ponder in Smith’s essays and sermons.