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Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets
- Year
- 1699
- Era
- 17th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- Specialist
Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets is the earliest English-language treatise devoted to salads, issued in 1699 by the diarist and horticulturist John Evelyn. Combining botanical observation, dietary philosophy and culinary instruction, it surveys herbs and raw vegetables suitable for the table, discusses their dressing with oil and vinegar, and reflects Evelyn's broader advocacy of a temperate, largely vegetable-based diet rooted in classical learning.
Cooking from this book
To Dress Cucumbers for a Sallet
Evelyn gives several methods for preparing what he considered the most approved of all salad vegetables, at a time when cucumbers were still suspected of being unwholesome and even poisonous in England. His recommended dressing of oil, citrus or vinegar, salt and pepper remains the foundation of cucumber salads today.
Let them be pared, and cut in thin slices, with a clove or two of onion to correct the crudity, macerated in the juice, often turned and moderately drained. Others prepare them by shaking the slices between two dishes, and dress them with very little oil, well beaten, and mingled with the juice of lemon, orange, or vinegar, salt and pepper. Some again (and indeed the most approved) eat them as soon as they are cut, retaining their liquor. Of old they boiled the cucumber, and paring off the rind, eat them with oil, vinegar, and honey, sugar not being so well known. The smaller sort (known by the name of gherkins) are muriated with the seeds of dill, and the mango pickle, for the winter.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
Artichoke Bottoms Preserved in Butter
Evelyn records the many ways the still relatively novel artichoke was enjoyed in late seventeenth-century England, including the elegant Italian method of broiling with oil and finishing with orange juice and sugar. The butter confit for winter storage is an early form of what the French would later perfect as confit, requiring an earthenware pot and clarified butter to seal out air.
The heads being slit in quarters first eaten raw, with oil, a little vinegar, salt, and pepper, gratefully recommend a glass of wine. They are likewise, whilst tender and small, fried in fresh butter crisp with parsley. When full grown, they are boiled the common way. The bottoms are also baked in pies, with marrow, dates, and other rich ingredients. In Italy they sometimes broil them, and as the scaly leaves open, baste them with fresh and sweet oil; but with care extraordinary, for if a drop fall upon the coals, all is marred; that hazard escaped, they eat them with the juice of orange and sugar.
The way of preserving them fresh all winter, is by separating the bottoms from the leaves, and after parboiling, allowing to every bottom a small earthen glazed pot; burying it all over in fresh melted butter, as they do wild-fowl. Or if more than one, in a larger pot, in the same bed and covering, layer upon layer.
They are also preserved by stringing them on pack-thread, a clean paper being put between every bottom, to hinder them from touching one another, and so hung up in a dry place. They are likewise pickled.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
