SALMAGUNDY [ 1723 ] iven the medieval suspicion of raw Library (Sloane ms 1201) has an alphabetical ingredients, and the taste for flesh list of more than a hundred herbs to be found and spectacle (which brought swan, in a well-stocked garden, from Alexanders and peacock and porpoise to the dining anise to verbena and wormseed. table), you might assume there was little interest From this wealth of plant life, mixed herb in salad in the Middle Ages. But this is not the and flower salads were created that proved case; there’s a recipe for Salat in the earliest extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages extant cookbook in English, The Forme of Cury, and beyond. The inclusion of edible flowers which was compiled around 1390 (see page 19): provided the drama of colour that medieval TO MAK E A S ALAMONGUNDY, diners took such delight in. And, since they S ALMINGONDIN, OR S ALGUNDY Take persel, sawge, grene garlic, chibolles, were thought to have medicinal properties, oynouns, leek, borage, myntes, porrettes, fenel, salad leaves escaped the stigma attached to and toun cressis, rew, rosemarye, purslarye; many raw fruits and vegetables (though not Mince a couple of Chickens, either boil’d or roasted very fine or Veal, if you lave and waische hem clene. Pike hem. Pluk everyone agreed: in the Boke of Kervynge, please; also mince the Yolks of hard Eggs very small; and mince also the Whites hem small with thyn honde and myng hem written around 1500, Wynkyn de Worde wel with rawe oile; lay on vunegar and salt, warned: “beware of grene sallettes & raw fruytes of the Eggs very small by themselves; also shred the Pulp of Lemons very small; and serve it forth. for they wyll make your soverayne seke.”) then lay in your Dish a Layer of your minced Meat, a Layer of Yolks of Eggs, a Besides, the composed nature of a salad made it Layer of Whites, a Layer of Anchovies, a Layer of your shred Lemon Pulp; a Clearly, salad composition was already relatively easy for a chef to juggle ingredients so as to Layer of Pickles, a Layer of Sorrel, a Layer of Spinage and Cloves, or else sophisticated by the fourteenth century. We achieve the necessary balance of humours shouldn’t be surprised at this, as there was a essential to health (see page 89), introducing Shalots shred small: When you have fill’d your Dish with all these Ingredients, well-developed tradition of horticulture in “warm”, “dry” aromatic herbs to counterbalance set an Orange or Lemon on the top; then garnish it with Horse-radish, scrap’d, England, and most people grew vegetables such the presence of “cold” leaves of endive or Barberries, and slices of Lemon. Then for the Sauce, beat up some Oil with the as onions, garlic, cabbage, and most of all leeks, purslane, and finishing it off with a “warm” oil- Juice of Lemons, Salt, and Mustard thick, and serve them up for a second to enliven their plain and basic fare, while and-vinegar dressing. manors and monasteries cultivated a range of By the end of the Tudor period, the salad had Course, Side-dish, or a Middle dish for Supper plants and herbs as food and medicine. In De made an evolutionary leap. It was now important Naturis rerum (On the Nature of Things), a for it to smell as good as it looked, and scented John Nott, The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary (1723) compendium of twelfth-century scientific flowers such as cowslip, elder and gillyflowers knowledge, Alexander Neckam gives a lengthy joined violets and primroses on the plate. The list of plants he’d expect to find in a garden, leaves and flowers would be garnished with including some that are familiar, such as parsley, hard-boiled eggs and all sorts of fruits: in The fennel, coriander, sage, savory, sorrel, mustard, Good Huswife’s Jewell (1596), Thomas Dawson and others that are not, such as smallage, advises pared and sliced lemons; in A Newe dittany, pellitory, southernwood and orach. A Booke of Cookerie (1617) John Murrell suggests fifteenth-century manuscript in theB ritish pomegranates, currants and barberries. These concoctions had become known as compound This, and his vocabulary De Utensilibus, are invaluable works for the salads, which Gervase Markham (author of The culinary historian. They’re also the source of Neckam’s main claim to fame as the first person in Europe to refer to the practice of using a English Huswife, 1615) defines as “young buds magnetic needle for navigation at sea. and knots of all manner of wholesome hearbes salmagundy 215 at their first springing; as red-sage, mints, lettice, age of the “grand salad”, which required an even violets, marigolds, spinage, and many others more diverse range of ingredients and a mixed together, and then served up to the distinctly artful arrangement on the plate. table with vinegar, sallet oyle and sugar”, before These were salads for show, designed to be going on to outline a version including chopped carried to the table with some ceremony. Robert almonds, shredded figs, currants, raisins, capers, May, whose beautiful woodcuts of intricate olives and a variety of leaves, all generously designs for tarts show a strong sense of garnished with slices of orange and lemon. presentation, was an expert practitioner of the In part, this move towards something more grand salad, offering no less than fourteen formal and fancy was simply a reflection of the recipes in The Accomplisht Cook (1660). May fashion of the times. The sacking of the selected all sorts of leaves, fruit, flowers and monasteries and appropriation of their land vegetables—lettuce, endive, borage, olives, begun by Henry VIII in 1536 had provided currants, pickled capers, pickled mushrooms, those who found favour at court with wealth boiled beetroots, shredded cabbage—and and influence. Keen to show off their enhanced neatly piled or laid them out either in a series of status, the Tudor gentry adopted an extravagant concentric rings or “in a cross partition-ways”, style of dress and built architecturally elaborate like a heraldic device. houses flanked by knot gardens: rectangular Towards the close of the century, this beds containing arrangements of plants and approach was taken to its logical extreme, with herbs into complex shapes such as ovals, mazes, the cornucopia of ingredients now including fleur-de-lys, or even heraldic beasts. In some cooked meats or seafood as well as vegetables, ways, therefore, the compound salad was simply eggs, leaves, fruit and pickles, and the whole a parallel opportunity to create a formal thing built up to give an impression of decorative composition of greenery that flaunted their magnificence.T his was the salmagundy (as the money and taste. There were other factors at heading to Nott’s recipe shows, its spelling was work too, though. The Renaissance approach open to wild variation), whose name is to cuisine was increasingly being taken up in supposedly derived from the French word England, and salads fitted in well with the new salmigondis, which means “hodgepodge”, Italian emphasis on fresh, clean flavours and although the eighteenth-century dish was the plentiful use of lemon. Allied to this, the anything but. Patrick Lamb’s recipe for Sallad- produce coming from the New World generated Magundy in Royal Cookery (1710) is several huge excitement about food and gave cooks an pages long, giving detailed instructions for the expanded set of ingredients to work with (see chopping and placement of each ingredient. page 118). Not surprisingly, this inspired many First a bed is made of lettuce shredded “as fine innovative and ambitious dishes, and compound as a Thread”. Above this, in the centre of the salads were among them. plate, “like the Top of a Sugar-Loaf ”, is a Meticulously prepared using a plethora of mound of diced chicken leg meat, hard-boiled ingredients, the compound salad provided a egg yolks and chopped parsley, anchovy and template for development over the next century lemon. Surrounding the mound, and laid neatly or so. The seventeenth century is known as the from the plate rim towards the centre, are strips salmagundy 217 of cold roast chicken breast and wing “three 1716 expanded edition of Lamb’s Royal Cookery, For the chicken, I already had in mind a cooking techniques aimed at capturing this, but inches long, as thin as a Knife, and a Quarter of which drew heavily on Massialot’s book. Nott’s favourite ingredient of mine that I was sure we couldn’t find a method that was consistent an Inch broad”, interleaved with anchovies. work isn’t a straightforward steal, though. He would be perfect for a salmagundy. Indeed, it enough. The solution we came up with was to The dish is garnished with cooked small onions, picks and chooses from Lamb and Massialot was one of the reasons I’d wanted to develop make an intense roast chicken stock by roasting with the largest placed on top of the diced meat, with an eye both to culinary fashion and British the dish in the first place.T he chicken’s “oysters” carcasses, deglazing the pan, adding aromatics and the rest around the rim “as thick as they tastes, adapting and simplifying where necessary. are two round, thumb-sized pieces of meat that and cooking it all in a pressure cooker to can lie one by another”. For service, Lamb says: Nott has two recipes for salmagundy in The lie either side of the backbone where it meets maximise the flavour, and then to use the stock, “beat up some Oil and Vinegar, Pepper, and Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary.