An American Champion of Salad Making: Terrapin Tom Murrey
Salad has become so much a part of American dining that it is difficult to realize there was a time—say before 1880—when chefs and householders considered it a treacherous part of the meal. Unless one had a relationship with a market gardener maintaining a greenhouse forcing garden that can supply lettuce and other greens in late autumn and winter, a green salad was a decidedly seasonal thing. Indeed the ideal was to serve them as early as possible in the spring to supply iron and the medicinal bitter greens that counter the bodily torpor of winter diets. In the 19th century lettuce was reckoned a bitter herb, and the old fashioned Spring dressing was to sprinkle a spoon of sugar and a douse of vinegar to the salad bowl. The 1880s saw the modernization of salads and the breakdown of old rules such as watercress for breakfast and lettuce, chives, and peppergrass for dinner.
There was prior to the 1880s a rather restricted and conventional set of salads that a home cook was expected to serve: chicken salad, beet salad, lobster salad, cold fish (a.k.a. tuna) salad, potato salad, tomato salad, cole slaw, lettuce salad, carrot salad (in New England), and perhaps a cold meat salad. The dressing tended to oil and vinegar, mayonnaise, and mustard dressings. The oil to vinegar ration ranged from 3 parts to 1 oil to vinegar to 4 to 1. The oil ideally was olive oil. The vinegar was usually apple cider or white vinegar. There was terrible problems with oil adulteration, and vinegar quality. Cookbook authors preached simplicity in dressing salads, but no amount of warning could aid the great challenged of salad making: that the acid element degraded whatever fresh greenery you put in the bowl. It the assembly of the salad was not timed precisely to the moment of consumption, the risk of serving a mass of wilted, soggy greens was great.
Thomas J. Murrey, who had been chef at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, and cook at the Astor House in New York stepped forward as the champion of modern salad making in the early 1880s, elucidating the mysteries of the bowl in several books: 1884’s Salads and Sauces, and Fifty Salads (1885). Murrey was a new sort of fellow—a trained culinarian who was also a man of letters. (He spent part of the 1890s on the staff of the New York Sun.) He won fame as a promoter of the chafing dish as a cooking utensil—that mainstay of Gilded Age Club Dining. President Grover Cleveland, a noted trencherman, called Murrey the “King of the Chafing Dish.” But in the culinary world he was generally known as “Terrapin Tom.” As a big city hotel cook he had mastered cooking breakfast so wrote a book on that meal. He was also an adept in shellfish cookery, an expertise that would blossom in the many seafood salads featured in his books. His books won him the position of executive Chef of the U. S. Congressional Restaurant. A hedonist and “past master of the art of good eating and keeping good company,” he arrived at that moment when he reckoned he had experienced all of the pleasures that a man could expect in life, so ended it at age fifty six with a gun. He left arrangements for a party in his honor [“Chafing Dish King Suicides,” San Jose Evening News (May 23, 1900), 5].
So what were the innovations that Terrapin Tom brought to the world of salads? Among them the first instruction for making avocado salad, albeit called “alligator pear,” an entry that concludes with the information that New Yorkers could in 1884 glimpse two small trees growing at the Everett House Café, grown from seeds immersed in water. He concocted a bamboo shoot salad for the use of resort chefs in Florida. He also provided instructions on the preparation of every green or herb that might be grown in North American—Bindweed, Black Bryony, Borage, Brooklime, Burdock, Burnet for the letter B. His Brussels Sprout Salads were 130 years ahead of their time. My own engagement with his encyclopedic exploration of salad came when I was searching for instructions for the making salad from the crowns of cabbage palmettos (a Lowcountry specialty of the early 20th century). He had two recipes in Salads and Sauces.
His Fifty Salads epitomized the familiar (Dandelion, Lettuce, Cress, Cucumber, Egg, Potato, Tomato), suggested novelties (Orange, Crayfish, Hop, Frog, Rabbit), and offered pioneering versions of seafood salads that would dominate twentieth century find dining on the coasts—Crab Salad, Shrimp Salad, Salmon Salad, Oyster Salad, Anchovy Salad.
In one respect Murrey was a classicist. He would brook only one substitution for olive oil in his dressing—pecan oil. And he warned consumers at length about the shenanigan oil importers engaged in when offering olive oil.