A Grand Sallet (Salad) - A 1660 Recipe from Robert May

With late May holidays recently past in those places that observe them, we are inching our way towards summer.   And with the weather sort of beginning to think about being warmer, thoughts turn to a Grand Sallet.  “Sallet,” probably intuitively, is an archaic spelling of “salade” or salad.   The word comes, via French and Italian, from Latin salio – “to salt” as Roman vegetables were usually dressed with something quite salty.  

Despite meat and pastry being king, in late medieval and Early Modern England, a grand salad was a common inclusion in banquets and bills of fare.  For instance, the influential cookery writer Robert May, beside “A Goose in Stuffado” and “A Shoulder of Mutton with Oysters” includes “a Grand Sallet” in “A Bill of Fare for All Saints Day, being Novemb. 1”.  He includes the dish in at least five other such menus including, not surprisingly, “A Bill of Fare formerly used on Fasting Dayes and in Lent.”

In his book The Accomplisht Cook, May has a section called “The best way of making all manner of Sallets;” to be fair it is relatively short compared to other more meaty portions but it does exist. He includes fourteen recipes for “grand” sallets but many of them include ingredients like broom-buds, crucifex peas, burnet, violet leaves, red coleworts and ellicksander (alexander) buds.  Not having ready access to these, I did manage to find one recipe with easily obtainable components.  I, therefore, present the following instructions for “Otherwayes [of making a Grand Salad]” and give a few more thoughts on Robert May’s similar dishes.

Recipe 

Otherwayes [ to make a Grand Sallet]

Ingredients 

• 20 pieces of candied orange peel, (about 1/3 of the recipe below, must be made ahead)
• 3-4 figs, fresh, if in season, or dried, sliced
• 25g currants
• 25g capers, chopped if large
• 20g almonds, plus more sliced for finishing olives 
• 50g raisins
• 75g (about 12-14) pitted black olives, divided
• 75g (about 12-14) pitted green olives, divided
• 5 small beets, cooked, peeled and halved,
• 100g (about 1/3 of a large) English cucumber, sliced
• 150g cabbage, sliced thin 
• 1 lemon, washed well 
• 60ml (about ¼ cup) of good flavourful oil (see Notes)
• 20ml (about 1 ½ tbsp) white wine vinegar

Instructions

Place figs in the centre of a medium platter. 

Arrange currants, capers, 20g of almonds, and raisins in separate piles surrounding the figs, forming a circle.

Place 8-10 of each colour of the olives across from each other, beyond the first circle. Beside them, add the beets and cucumber slices in sections to complete another circle. 

 

Arrange the sliced cabbage around the outside, which should take you to the edge of your platter. 

Cut the nub ends from the lemon and then slice into 4 crowns. To do this, make a series of 45° cuts with a paring knife ¼ of the way from one end of the lemon.  Push those cuts all the way through so your first crown will separate from the rest of the lemon.  Repeat another set of cuts ¼ of the way in from the other end of the lemon.  This will leave you with the centre of the lemon with 2 jagged ends.  Carefully halve the lemon, giving you 2 more crowns. 

Place the 4 crowns equally spaced around the edge of your platter.

Pierce your remaining olives with a few sliced almonds each.  Place the olives around the edge of the platter, alternating colours and spacing them equally. 

In between the lemon crowns and beside the olives, place your dried candied orange peels. 

Mix oil and vinegar in a container and serve alongside completed salad platter. 

Candied Orange Peel (Orangado) 

Adapted from www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/simple-candied-orange-peel-350798

Ingredients 

• 1 large orange, well washed and one end cut off
• 400g (about 2 cups) sugar, divided 
• 350ml (about 1 ½ cup) water 

Instructions

Place orange on large cutting board, cut end down.

With a sharp knife, work around the orange, cutting off the peel top to bottom.  Cut off sections as large as you can without cutting into the flesh too much. This should include a fair bit but not all the pulp.

Thinly slice the sections you have cut off.

  

Boil the slices in a large pot of water for 15 minutes. Drain, rinse with cold water and drain again. 

In a medium pot, combine 300g (1 ½ cups) of sugar with the measured 350ml (1 ½ cups) of water and bring to a boil over medium/high heat.

Add your slices of orange peel, reduce heat to low and simmer for 45 minutes.

Remove slices from what is now syrup with a slotted spoon.  Reserve syrup, if desired, for another use.

 

Toss your slices in the remaining 100g of sugar.

Making sure the sugared slices are separated, place on a cooling rack or tin foil and let stand for 24 hours.

Notes

A 1678 copy of The Accomplisht Cook 
which I photographed at the Bodleian Library

Robert May provides no quantities for the ingredients in this salad, so the amount of ingredients above is mostly based on what worked aesthetically on the platter as well as the idea that cabbage was the base green. 

I used good extra virgin olive oil for my dressing. Rape seeds were grown in England in the period and there is very flavourful cold-pressed oil made from them, which is available in the UK today.  Canola oil came from rape seed oil but was bred for healthy high heat cooking and has little flavour, so I did not use it.  My historical rationale/excuse for olive oil was that Robert May uses many foreign ingredients in his book and could well have had access to this one.  A similar thought process went into choosing white wine vinegar. 

I used two kinds of olives, as the instructions did not specify, and the variety was welcomed.  I also used canned beets. 

As far as taste goes, this is a very nice salad.  There is a lot of sweet, so when May says you can add sugar if you want, I did not.  The olives, capers, dressing, and the bitter notes of the cabbage counteract it and prevent it from becoming too cloying.  There are some textures, from the almonds to the cucumbers to the cabbage, that provide some relief from a lot of soft and sticky ingredients.  Overall, not too far from what can pass for an interesting coleslaw in modern terms.

Despite, as I mentioned, the Early Modern upper-class diet being very meat and grain-heavy, many of the cookery books mention or give recipes for a “grand sallet.”  Above I include some of the other bill of fares where May calls for one and below the recipes he gives for other versions of the dish.

I may continue the vegetable theme in the coming week, focusing on one or more recipes from period vegetarian writers.  

Chocolate Sea-Duck (actually Cornish Game Hen) with Livers, Mushrooms and Chestnuts (1692)

Staying in the world of early European chocolate, as promised, I take a step toward the savoury.  This week’s adaption is a bird in chocolate sauce with livers, mushrooms, and chestnuts.  I first came across this dish in the English cookery book I was working with last week - The Court and Country Cook (1702). As I mentioned then, this text comes from translating much of the content in two earlier books by Frenchman François Massialot. He was cook to the French king’s brother and his recipes were set down as Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (1691) and Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits (1692).

In Le cuisinier are instructions for “Macreuse en ragoût au Chocolat,” rendered in the English version as “A Sea-duck with Chocolate in Ragoo.” A ragout was then, as now, a hearty sauce or stew with a variety of ingredients. Macreuse translates directly as “scoter” today.  A scoter is a smaller duck and most species at least winter near coastal waters, so “Sea-duck” seems appropriate in the period.  (To make things a little confusing, macreuse in French today can be one of a couple cuts of beef from the foreleg of the animal.)

For my attempt at this, I could not get sea-duck or, unfortunately, any game bird of that size.  I ended up going with what I could find in time, a Cornish game hen, which is not in fact a game bird.   The ragout also calls for truffles and some mushrooms that I could not get in time or cheap enough.  So, my version is a bit more “inspired by” than usual but I really enjoyed the result. I present an adaption of the base recipe from Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois, combined with instructions for drinking chocolate used in the dish from Nouvelle instruction, then some notes on my interpretation. 

Recipe

Ingredients 

“Boisson” de Chocolat (Drinking Chocolate)  

• 250ml (about 1 cup) water
• 28g (about 1 oz.) unsweetened chocolate, preferable 100% cacao, chopped finely 
• 28g (about 1 oz.) sugar 
• Pinch of chili flakes
• ½ tsp vanilla extract
• ¼ tsp ground cloves
• ¼ tsp ground cinnamon 
• ½ tsp orange flower water (optional)

Bird

• 1 Cornish Game Hen (about 650g) (See Notes)
• Olive oil (for coating bird)
• Salt 
• Pepper 
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 bouquet garni (I used thyme, rosemary, sage, and parsley tied in cheesecloth)
• 1 recipe of “Boisson” de Chocolat (see above) 

Ragout

• 14g package of dried mixed wild mushrooms (See Notes)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 150g chicken livers, separated and cut into bite-size pieces
• 300g (about 2/3 lbs) white or button mushrooms
• 115g (about 20) chestnuts, cooked, peeled, and sliced (See Notes)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Preheat your barbeque on medium heat (See Notes)

In a small heat-proof bowl, cover your dried mushrooms with boiling water and allow to stand.  

Drinking chocolate

Bring one cup of water to a boil in a small pot.

Add the chocolate and stir until melted and combined.

Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir to combine.

Reduce heat to low, cover and let cook for 15 minutes. 

Set aside.

Bird 

Wash your bird, then thoroughly dry it with paper towel.

Rub with olive oil and season with salt and pepper inside and out.

On your barbeque, grill each side of the bird until it takes on a good char.

Place the bird, breast side up, in a large saucepan or medium stockpot with the bay leaf and bouquet garni.

Pour over the drinking chocolate and cover.

Over high heat, bring to a boil.  

Reduce the heat to low and let simmer until the meat of the thickest part of the thigh reaches 80°C (about 180°F). This will take about 45 minutes.

Ragout

While your bird is cooking, melt the butter in a large frying pan over medium high heat. 

Add your chicken livers and fry, stirring, until coloured all over.

Add regular mushrooms and fry until they start to release their moisture.  If your pan is initially dry, add a little of the water from the bowl your dried mushrooms are in. 

Once the mushrooms are partially cook and there is liquid in the pan, add all the water from the dried mushrooms.  

Chop those now rehydrated mushrooms roughly and add to the pan.

Add the chestnuts.

Reduce heat to medium low, cover and cook for a half hour. 

Set aside, keeping warm.  

Assemble your dish by putting the ragout on a platter and placing your bird on top.  

Pour the chocolate sauce from your saucepan, into a serving container, discarding the bay leaf and bouquet. Serve alongside. 

Notes

A 1698 edition of Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois.

The English translation from 1702

This recipe comes originally from Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois and in it Massialot says “vous ferez un peu de Chocolat” or in the English translation “a little Chocolate is to be made.”  “Making” chocolate generally meant the drink in the period.  Le cuisinier does not say how to make this drinking chocolate but Massialot’s other book Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits has a section devoted to it, as I mentioned in my last entry.  The cook writes that chocolate was generally obtained as a solid, but it included other ingredients beyond the base cacao.  The portion of my recipe that deals with the drinking chocolate is then a combination of two parts of Massialot’s section on this import from the Americas. First, I needed to add the additional ingredients that he says make up the solid chocolate: vanilla (I used extract instead of pods), sugar, cinnamon, chili flakes (“le Poivre de Mexique”) and cloves. Orange flower water is one of the optional ingredients he mentions, along with musk and ambergris; I had some so I added it. In another paragraph, he says you grate the solid into boiling water and add more sugar if it doesn’t have enough for you; then it is further boiled and then frothed for drinking.  I did not froth it, but I used the rest of the instructions to finish my drinking chocolate.  

1715 edition of Nouvelle instruction
pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits. 

In the first edition of Nouvelle instruction, one of the additional ingredients for the solid chocolate base is “l’Achiote.”  Achiote today can be a paste with annatto seeds as its base; it can also be used interchangeably with annatto itself, which is probably what Massialot is referring to.  Annatto seeds are bright red and come from a tree called bixa orellana.  Native to Central and South America, it was used as dye and paint, then later as a food additive, before it was spread around the world by Spanish colonisers. Achiote paste today has other ingredients like cumin, pepper, coriander, oregano, cloves, and garlic, in addition to the seeds. The taste of the annatto seeds themselves is said to be a bit sweet, peppery and a little bitter.  I also could not get this ingredient in time, but my adaption is not wholly unfaithful because later editions of Nouvelle instruction, for whatever reason, omit this from the list of chocolate solid additives. Those same later editions do add more extensive instruction for processing the cacao plant itself and more chocolate recipes.

The first edition of Nouvelle Instructions which includes
achiote as one of the chocolate solid ingredients.
Compare the 1734 edition below.

The achiote is absent but also notice the change in heading 
to reflect that these later editions include instructions to
make "faire" the chocolate solid as well as the drink.

Massialot gives almost no quantities in his Macreuse recipe, the exception being that he calls for “un quarteron de marons [chestnuts].” As I have mentioned before, this could be a quarter of a French livre (pound) or a quarter of a hundred count of something. I went with the former, but it was actually close to the latter as well.  I did try to match the quantities provided for the drinking chocolate: he calls for a French once of chocolate, which is somewhere around a modern US ounce, and an equal amount of sugar. For the remaining ingredients, in the chocolate and in the bird dish as a whole, the quantities were down to my judgment. 

If you can find a game bird - a mallard or wood duck, or even pheasant - it would be a great replacement for the Cornish game hen I used. Cornish game hens are pretty much small-bred chickens and I chose it for its size and availability. The darker gaminess you get from those other birds would probably work even better against the sweet and bitter of the chocolate.

The instructions for the ragout in Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois call for “les foies, champignons, morilles, mousserons and truffles.”  The “foies” or livers probably meant the liver from the sea-duck, the closest replacement I had available were chicken livers.  “Champignons” are regular mushrooms which I used.  For cost, I did not used “morilles” – morel mushrooms – or “truffles.”  “Mousserons” also called fairy rings are somewhat common in Europe, but I could not get them in time.  To sort of replace those last three fungi, I used the dry mixed wild mushrooms. 

The period recipes say that your bird is “blanchir” in French - or “broil’d a little” in the English translation - over coals before it is put in the pot with the chocolate.  I used a barbeque to do something similar and it added a great taste: the char with the sweet and spices in the chocolate was actually a kind of BBQ sauce.  Alternatively, you could briefly broil it in an oven or sear all sides of the bird with some oil in a frying pan.

A modern ragout would be wetter than what I ended up with, I believe the chestnuts suck up a lot of the moisture. Having made a few significant other replacements, I decided not to add some stock and a thickening agent but those would give it a richer consistency. That said, adding the remaining chocolate cooking liquor/sauce does add some moisture in the completed dish. 

Despite using a Cornish game hen, I was really pleased with the results of this recipe. The chocolate flavour taken on by the outside of the bird works extremely well with the barbeque sear.  The added chocolate sauce helps add that to the rest of the bird. I will probably make a barbeque sauce based on those ingredients, maybe bumping up the chili flakes or replacing them with fruitier peppers.  The meat stays moist due to the initial broil and the relatively slow cook in liquid.  The ragout/side of livers, chestnuts and mushrooms hits all the notes you would expect - iron, earthy, and sweet. I would really like to do this again, especially with a game bird. 

We will probably leave chocolate for a bit this coming week and maybe try to find a period sallet (salad), since it might actually be a bit warm where I am.

18th Century Chocolate Recipes - Puffs and a Cream

A couple months ago, I adapted a recipe for a Chocolate Tart from 1737 and promised a bit more about English chocolate history.  This week I present a bit more – a couple very simple adapted recipes and a little about what “chocolate” meant in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Like several of my adaptions recently, the chocolate dishes I tried start from a non-English source.  François Massialot was chief cook to Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, brother of French King Louis XIV.   The cook’s recipes were published in two books: Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (1691) and Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits (1692). In 1702, content from both books was translated into English as The Court and Country Cook, with part of the subtitle - “Together with New Instructions for Confectioners” - acknowledging the second of the two originals.  

In Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois there is a recipe for “Crème de Chocolat,” which is translated as “Chocolate-cream.”  My adaption of this is essentially a very nice hot chocolate. Also in The Court and Country Cook are instructions for “Chocolate-biskets” which come from “Biscuits de Chocolat” in the Nouvelle instruction. I believe a later English book - A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery (1714) - probably bases its recipe for “Chocolate-Puffs” on these “biskets.”  The ingredients are the same, the methods are similar and the translation of Massialot’s work was very influential among English cooks of the period.  I have chosen to base my adaptation on the later recipe because it includes quantities. 

I therefore present recipes for “Chocolate-cream” and “Chocolate-Puffs,” then give some notes on adaption for each, and on some of Massialot’s general writing about chocolate. 

Recipes

"Chocolate-Cream"

Ingredients

• 570 ml (about 1 imperial quart) milk
• 115 g (about ¼ lbs) sugar 
• 1 egg yolk
• 25g of unsweetened chocolate, grated

Instructions

In a medium saucepan, add the sugar to the milk. Stir to dissolve.

On medium high heat, bring the milk to a boil.  

Boil for 15 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent catching and burning.

Stirring constantly, add your egg yolk slowly.

Continuing to stir, allow to boil for another minute and remove from heat. 

Stir in grated chocolate until completely melted and combined.

Return to the heat and return to the boil for another minute. 

Pass the liquid through a fine mesh sieve, discarding any solids. 

Serve hot or warm.

Notes

A 1705 edition of Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois 

I tried to match the quantities from the original French recipe, which was relatively easy since the instruction are so simple.  Massialot calls for a “quarteron” of sugar and quarteron could mean a quarter of a lot of things; however, in context, the English translator rendering it as “a quarter of a Pound” seems correct.  Both versions say to add enough chocolate for the cream to take its colour; 25g was my judgement on that. 

In a couple of instances, the recipes measure timings in “boullions” or “tours” in French, translated as “walms” in English.  “Walm” meant “roll or boil up” so in cookery, a walm was when a liquid came up to a full boil.  I translated this into minutes.  

In a modern version of this, you would probably temper the egg yolk with a little of the hot milk before adding it.  Adding it straight means the egg scrambles and forms small chunks.  I think the original recipe dealt with this by calling for the drink to be strained before service.  The French instructions call for it to be passed through “étamine” or cheesecloth.

Despite what the term “Chocolate-Cream” might conjure in a modern context, this is, as I said, hot chocolate made just a bit richer with egg yolk.  The chocolate smoothness is enhanced, and it is actually an extremely nice, if a little process-heavy, version of the drink. 

"Chocolate-Puffs"

Ingredients

• 225g (about ½ lbs) caster (berry) sugar, sifted 
• 30g (about 1 oz) unsweetened chocolate, finely grated
• 1 egg white

Instructions

Preheat an oven to 95°C (200°F). 

Prepare a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. 

Whisk together sugar and chocolate in a medium bowl.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg white into a froth but not until it forms peaks.

Mix egg white into sugar and chocolate mixture until it forms a firm paste.

After wetting or oiling your hands, roll small pieces of paste into balls or logs.  

Press each between your hands slightly to flatten it.  

Place at least a centimeter apart on your parchment-covered baking sheet.

Bake for 2 hours.  

Very carefully remove from the oven and allow to cool completely. (Not doing this means you only have a couple for presentation - see my pictures.) 

Serve.

Notes

The 5th (1734) edition of A Collection of
Above Three Hundred Receipts

The book from whence these puffs came, A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery, is a compilation of a number of people’s recipes sent to publication by one Mary Kettilby.

The actual instructions are for “Lemon or Chocolate-Puffs” with the quantity of chocolate provided at the end of the recipe.  I followed the instructed quantities as written for the chocolate and the other two ingredients. 

The paste is explicitly formed into shapes “some round and some long.” 

A 1715 edition of Nouvelle instruction
pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits 

I include Massialot’s “Biscuits de Chocolat” recipe and its translation above for comparison.  He combines the chocolate and egg white first, then adds the sugar.  Both sets of instructions say to lay your shapes on paper and cook at a very low temperature: “a very slow oven” in English and “à petit feu” in French. The latter translates as “with a small fire” but can also mean “a little by little.” 

The long bake time was in hope that these would firm up and maybe puff more; the result was different from that texturally, but they worked in the end.  As I mentioned in the instructions, being made mostly of hot sugar, these are very fragile until cooled.  The parchment slipped off the baking sheet and made crumbs of most of mine. In hindsight, something like egg white between the parchment and the baking sheet would have helped. 

Overall, the crunchiness of slow baked then cooled sugar and the flavour of the chocolate was very nice. I found them, unsurprisingly, too sweet and would use more chocolate to sugar, if I were making them just to eat.   

Historical Notes on Massialot and “Chocolat”

Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits, in a section that also includes coffee and tea, has several pages on the topic of chocolate.  This, however, is not among the parts of that book that were included in the translated Court and Country Cook, even though the English text has a section on drinks as well.

The beginning of the section on chocolat, including the 
ingredients of the pâte solide used to make the drink.

Massialot’s writing make the distinction between chocolate and cacao when he says how to make drink. He says it is made with a “pâte solide” of different ingredients, the primary base of which is “le Cacao.”  The other ingredients are achiote, vanilla pods, sugar, cinnamon, Mexican pepper, – probably chilis – and cloves.  Some add orange flower water, musk, or ambergris.  If that is the composition of his “chocolat,” it would certainly change the taste of these recipes. 

He describes the actual cacao plant, fruit, and beans quite accurately. Also included are explanations of what achiote and vanilla are; they being less familiar products of the Americas along with cacao. The best chocolate is, however, prepared in Spain according to the French cook. In extensive detail, the text then provides instructions for making chocolate – the drink – from the cacao-based solid paste. Being very reductive, it comes down to grating the solid paste into boiling water or milk with sugar.  

Later editions of Nouvelle instruction would expand this section greatly, providing step-by-step instructions of how to prepare and roast cacao beans and including more extensive descriptions of the additives. A number of other chocolate recipes are added to the book as a whole. They include “Massepain [marzipan] de Chocolat”, “Pastilles [a kind of gum and sugar candy] de Chocolat”, and additional recipes for chocolate cream and biscuits. Massailot or his successors seemed to have developed a thorough first-hand knowledge of working with the then American import. 

Next week, I want to attempt another Massailot chocolate recipe – one from his original Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois and translated in The Court and Country Cook.  It is “A Sea-duck with Chocolate in a Ragoo.” I will probably use a regular duck and probably won’t get all the mushrooms and truffles it calls for, but I am going to try to give it a try.