Page:Hill - Salads, Sandwiches, and Chafing-Dish Dainties.djvu/30

 While salads may be compounded of all kinds of delicate meats, fish, shellfish, eggs, nuts, fruit, cheese and vegetables, cooked or uncooked, two things are indispensable to every kind and grade of salad, viz., the foundation of vegetables and the dressing.

The Dressing.

Salads are dressed with oil, acid and condiments; and, sometimes, a sweet, as honey or sugar, is used. A perfect salad is not necessarily acetic. The presence of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, most pernicious": —

Aromatic vinegars, a few drops of which, used occasionally, lend piquancy and variety to an every-day salad, can be purchased at high-class provision stores; but the true salad-maker is an artist, and prefers to compound her own colors (i.e., vinegars); therefore we have given several recipes for the same, which may be easily modified to suit individual tastes.

Indeed, the dressing of a salad, though in the early days of the century considered a special art,—an art that rendered it possible for at least one noted Royalist refugee to amass a considerable 6