Recipe for a Salad
To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole;
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar, procured from town;
And lastly, o’er the flavoured compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
O green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
’T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he ’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl;
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me,—I have dined to-day.”
The rhymed recipe has a long history, not only as a mnemonic device, but, as suggested here, having an aesthetic dimension. It might still be a form worth resurrecting; a cook’s memory can’t be spattered, smeared, mistakenly baked or liquidised during the distractions of the moment. The Reverend Sydney Smith’s salad dressing recipe received the accolade of inclusion by Eliza Acton in Modern Cookery, but it was Marion Harland who made the poem’s transatlantic reputation, reproducing it in the book Common Sense in The Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery. Her manual was the most successful American cookbook by the end of the 19th century, selling more than 10m copies. It may be the reason that Recipe for a Salad dominates the record of Smith’s poetry online, though a few other poems are available.
Smith was born in Essex in 1771, and claimed descent from the Huguenots on his mother’s side. His father, an eccentric merchant, thwarted his ambitions to read for the bar, and Smith reluctantly took Holy Orders. He studied medicine, chemistry and moral philosophy, and no doubt his scientific interests inform the reference to those “scarce-suspected atoms” in lines five and six in the Recipe. During his five years in Scotland, he was appointed editor of the newly founded Edinburgh Review, but despite that Smith is not primarily remembered as a literary figure, even with the wit and vitality of his continually-quoted sermons and letters.
Smith was active in many areas of social reform. Perhaps unusual for an idealist, he seems to have possessed considerable insight into human psychology. Suffering painfully from what he called “low moods”, he advised against contact with “poetry, dramatic representation (except comedy), serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.” He suggested that a similarly afflicted friend should take “short views of human life – not further than dinner or tea.”
The salad dressing recipe, un-versified, was included in a letter sent by Smith to Elizabeth Vassall Fox, or Lady Holland, in 1839. It had clearly been proven in the eating, but what are the ingredients which, particularly in the UK, simultaneously give the recipe-as-poem its credentials as comic verse, underlined by representation in such anthologies as The Nation’s Favourite Comic Poems?
I think that it’s the deftness with which Smith weaves between the mock heroic and what I might call the un-mocking enthusiastic. Of course, the enthusiasm is exaggerated, as is the diction at times. (“Your poet begs”, “thou man of herbs”, etc.) But the overall tone suggests sensuous pleasures of texture and flavour truthfully registered. Not even the recipe’s climax, in which the dying anchorite is persuaded to discard religious scruples and “plunge his fingers in the salad bowl”, is absurd or unsympathetic. Smith’s descriptive couplet brings the anchorite to life, the poet smiling at himself for the extremity of his enjoyment.
While salad is not generally considered a comfort food, the dressing Smith describes as a “condiment” is rich in protein (all that “pounded yellow”) and sustenance. His genial couplets are gently distracting chimes of reassurance at a time when a “magic soupçon” of cheer might be needed by those following political developments in the UK. I’ve chosen it for a week when comfort is much in need, as the Brexit salad is tossed, dropped, liquidised, thrown at the wall, scooped up, mixed up, and served again.
How pleasant it must have been to know Smith – and how useful his “wit and wisdom” might have been to us now.
