A Poet’s Salad

Even ethereal poets have to eat. So when members of Voices Israel meet for a workshop later this month they’ll need to break for lunch.

 

Perhaps a little salad - with a splash of elegant dressing?

How about that devised by the Rev Sydney Smith? He was the 18th-19th century English  clergyman and litterateur now best remembered as the founder of the Edinburgh Review. Rev Smith’s enduring fame means many well-known epigrams are attributed to him and my favourite is about his friend, Henry Luttrell, whose idea of heaven, he was supposed to have remarked, was ‘eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets’.

As a mere earthbound vegetarian, here I post  Rev Smith’s poetic recipe for dressing which became popular among U.S. cooks after it was reproduced in Common Sense in The Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery by Marion Harland (Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune). Her book was the most successful U.S. recipe manual at the end of the 19th century, selling more than ten million copies.

 

 

“Sydney Smith's Salad (Dressing)

“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 treat!
'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”.

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© Natalie Wood (11 June 2014)