Salmagundi
Origin: Tidewater Virginia
Source: Mary Randolph, 1824
History
Salmagundi entered English in the 1670s, defined then as a dish "of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions, with oil and condiments." Mary Randolph's version in The Virginia House-Wife (1824) retains every one of those elements.
The name's origin is disputed. Etymonline traces it to French salmigondis (16th c.), originally "seasoned salt meats," with a proposed derivation from Latin sal ("salt") and condire ("to season, flavor") — while stating that the ultimate origin of the French term remains uncertain. A competing account derives it from Italian salami conditi, "pickled meat," and glosses the French sense as a "disparate assembly of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent whole." These accounts conflict, and nothing consulted here adjudicates between them.
The dish is well attested in English long before Randolph. Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656) describes "a dish of meat made of cold Turkey and other ingredients." Mary Kettilby (1734) begins hers: "TAKE a cold Turkey, two cold Chickens, or, if you have neither, a piece of fine white Veal will do." Charlotte Mason (1777) arranges chicken or veal, boiled eggs, parsley, herring, anchovies, beetroot and red cabbage in rows.
The inverted-bowl construction has precedent: Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery (1747) carries four salmagundi recipes and suggests ingredients arranged in circular tiers on the table, each round elevated on an inverted saucer or tea cup. That Randolph's single inverted bowl descends specifically from Glasse is inference, not documented.
The dish was popular in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cookbooks and seems to have disappeared from the menu in Victorian times; the 1824 printing sits near the end of that run. The word outlasted it: Washington Irving, his brother William, and James Kirke Paulding titled their satirical periodical "Salmagundi; or The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others," twenty issues between January 1807 and January 1808.
Of the kitchen that produced Randolph's book, scholarship holds that the majority of the labour was done by Black women, and finds evidence that enslaved cooks had a significant influence on how she prepared food.
Ingredients
- Anchovies
- White meat of fowl
- Hard boiled eggs
- Parsley
- Ham
- Celery
- Capers
- Butter
- 1 small glass Egg dressing
Instructions
- Turn a bowl upside down on the serving dish. Beginning at the bottom, arrange all minced ingredients in regular rings around the inverted bowl in a fanciful manner: anchovies (bones removed), white poultry meat (skinless), hard boiled eggs with yolks and whites chopped separately, parsley, scraped lean ham, and inner celery stalks.
- Place a row of capers around the base of the bowl. Arrange the remaining ingredients in decorative rings above, according to fancy.
- Top with a small pyramid of butter. Serve with a small glass of egg dressing (prepared as for salad) on the side.