Today’s Poem: Recipe for a Salad

Deem it not, thou Man of Herbs, a Fault

Édouard Vuillard, Still Life with Salad, c. 1888 (Meisterdrucke)

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Recipe for a Salad

by Sydney Smith

Two large potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Unwonted softness to the salad give:
Of mordant mustard, add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment which bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt:
Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And once with vinegar, procured from town;
True flavour needs it, and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And lastly, on the flavoured compound toss,
A magic teaspoon of anchovy sauce:
Then though green turtle fail, though venison’s tough,
And ham and turkey are not boiled enough,
Serenely full, the epicure may say —
“Fate cannot harm me, — I have dined to-day”
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Sydney Smith (1771–1845) — a personal favorite, whose Wit and Wisdom we mentioned in a recent post about the sanity of Samuel Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” — had a superb way of making salad. Or so, at least, insisted his daughter Saba (who married to become Lady Holland). And though, she says, he kept secret his technique for dressing a salad for many years, she at last wheedled it out of him. After his death, she included his rhyming recipe in the first volume of her 1855 Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith.

An 1883 caricature of Sydney Smith (Wikimedia Commons)

From there it passed to Marion Harland (a penname of the American writer Mary Virginia Terhune), who placed it in her 1871 Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery, a wildly successful text — which is how the recipe came to appear in several later cookbooks in the United States.

Of course, no cook can leave a dish alone, and Lady Holland seems to have made changes to her father’s recipe (or perhaps reproduced an early version of her father’s rhymes). Harland made her own alterations — suggesting, for example, using Worcestershire or Harvey’s sauce in place of anchovies.

For Today’s Poem, we go back to an 1844 letter for Smith’s own final version. The “Oil of Lucca” in line 7 refers to olive oil produced near the town of Lucca in Tuscany, an upscale ingredient for British cooks in the first half of the 19th-century, to be matched with vinegar “procured from town” (and thus presumably an English cider vinegar).

The final line, “Fate cannot harm me, — I have dined to-day,” parodies a tag about fickle fate from Horace (Ode 3.29) in John Dryden’s 1685 translation, “Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.” Smith’s line became a tag of its own, common enough that, say, P.G. Wodehouse could play with it in a 1913 story: “His face wore a look of placid content and he had a general air of happy repletion, a fate-cannot-touch-me-I-have-dined-to-day expression. He was chewing gum.”

With its cooked potato mash, hard-boiled egg yolks, and some small portion of smashed onions, Smith’s dressing is thicker than many oil-and-vinegar-based salad dressings these days, but the garum-like umami of the “magic” anchovy sauce, the mustard (of which Smith is a little wary), and the extra salt — “Deem it not, thou Man of Herbs, a Fault” — make it a strong dressing for any salad.

In her 1864 A Poetical Cook-Book, Maria J. Moss begins each of her recipes with a brief passage from a (typically 18th-century) poet that mentions a food — for which she then gives prose instructions for cooking:

CAPER SAUCE.

Along these shores
Neglected trade with difficulty toils,
Collecting slender stores; the sun-dried grape,
Or capers from the rock, that prompt the taste
Of luxury.
—Dyer [i.e., John Dyer, from his 1757 The Fleece, 4:65–69]

To make a quarter of a pint, take a tablespoonful of capers and two teaspoonfuls of vinegar. The present fashion of cutting capers is to mince one-third of them very fine, and divide the others in half; put them into a quarter of a pint of melted butter, or good thickened gravy; stir them the same way as you did the melted butter, or it will oil. Some boil and mince fine a few leaves of parsley or chevrel or tarragon, and add to the sauce; others, the juice of half a Seville orange or lemon.

For his own salad dressing, however, Sydney Smith poeticizes the actual recipe. If doggerel requires varying line lengths and forced false stresses, then Smith’s fairly regular iambic pentameter couplets are not doggerel, only doggerel-adjacent. But here on one of our lighter, more whimsical, Wednesdays at Poems Ancient and Modern, the recipe does remind us of one of the old purposes of rhyme: to aid memorization of instructions and information. And have a little fun along the way.

James Peale, Still Life with Vegetables, 1826 (Wikimedia Commons)

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