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.