A Forgotten 18th Recipe for a Grand Colorful Salad Known as ‘Salamagundy’

In the series “Food That Time Forgot”, historian Jon Townsend reached back to an 18th century recipe for a forgotten dish known as Salamagundy, a grand salad that contained a vast array of colorful savory ingredients that were arranged just so.

It would have a base, sometimes of greens. It didn’t always have to have greens, but it usually had meat products. It would have pickled products. …They would make this into a huge and very colorful dish. It was very important for it to have all these different colors and that it would be put  together in a very very spectacular kind of way. 

Townsend talked about a recipe from the1793 cookbook The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book and Compleat Family Cook by Sarah Harrison. The recipe called for roast turkey cooked with anchovies, pickled oysters, and mushrooms.

Mince the white of a cold turkey that has been roasted with eight anchovies, eight pickled oysters, six pickled cucumbers, minced all small. Lay it all on a dish handsomely. Lay around all sorts of pickles and mushrooms, cloves, capers, samphire and set it  by oil and vinegar. This is proper to a cold treat. 

The recipe he prepared, however, was from the 1747 cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse with a bit of influence from from the 1814 cookbook A New System of Domestic Cookery by  Maria Eliza Rundell.

Mince veal or a fowl very small. A pickled herring boned and picked small. Cucumber minced small. Apples minced small. An onion peeled and   minced small. Some pickled red cabbage, chopped  small. Cold pork minced small or a cold duck or pigeons minced small  Boiled parsley chopped  fine. Celery cut small. Yolks of hard eggs chopped small. The whites chopped small. Either lay all the ingredients by themselves separate on saucers or in heaps in a dish. Lay them out with what pickles you have and sliced lemon nicely cut.  If you get stertion flowers lay them around. Makes  a fine middle dish for supper but you may always make salamagundy of such things as you have.