Salmagundy

Although I did provide an entry in the salad challenge, I got to be thinking. A FotW challenge shouldn’t just be something we should all attempt. It should also be, well, challenging.

With that in mind, here is one version of salmagundi. Salmagundi is an 18th century arranged salad, and varied in ingredients based on what was available and the cooks imagination. Hannah Glasse, alone, in her “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy” has at least three different recipes. This is one of them, just as it appears:

A Salmagundy

Take two pickled herrings and bone them, a handful of parsley, four eggs boiled hard, the white of one roasted chicken or fowl; chop all very fine separately, that is, the yolks of eggs by themselves, and the whites the same; scrape some lean boiled ham very fine, hung-beef or Dutch beef scraped; turn a small china bason, or deep saucer, into your dish; make some butter into the shape of a pine-apple, or any other shape you please, and set on the top of the bason or saucer; lay round your bason a ring of shred parsley, they whites of eggs, then ham, then chickens, then beef, then yolks of eggs, then herrings, til you have covered the bason and used all your ingredients. Garnish the dish with whole capers and pickles of any sort you choose, chopped fine; or you may leave out the butter and put the ingredients on, and put a flower of any sort at the top, or a sprig of myrtle.

Hannah points out, at the bottom of a different recipe that “you may always make salmagundi of such things as you have, according to your fancy.” Good advice for any sort of cooking, if you ask me.

Calling this a herring salad is misleading at best, Margi. There are half a dozen major ingredients, including, in addition to the herring, chicken, eggs, ham, and beef.

Generically, this is an arranged salad, and doesn't call attention to any of the specific ingredients because they're all of equal importance.

In this one, the chopped ingredients are laid out directly on the serving platter, in concentric rings. In other versions, each of them is put in its own bowl first. Either way, the whole arrangement surrounds a centerpiece of butter (as in this case), flowers, or something similar.

It looks good, Brook - what I find interesting is that the process and the arrangement are at least as important - if not more - as the ingredients. It indicates a stylised method that, back in the day, may have been what got the true compliments, perhaps even over the taste.