Category Archives: Appetisers

Hector’s Waldorf Salad

Posted on by
5

Hector’s Waldorf Salad is a combination of fresh raw apples, celery slices, broken walnuts and sultanas, mixed with good quality mayonnaise. I like it because it’s quick and easy to prepare, tastes fresh and crunchy and is a change from the quick sandwich I usually have for lunch. It tastes quite sweet which satisfies any post-lunch sugar cravings.

It’s also a good way to use up the celery that sometimes arrives in our weekly organic veg box  (I’m not a great fan of raw celery sticks) and the stray apple that always seems to linger too long in the fruit bowl and never gets eaten.

The original Waldorf Salad was invented by the maitre d’ of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, Oscar Tschirky, just after the hotel opened in 1893. He first made it for a supper held in the hotel for 1500 members of the city’s elite. The recipe was then published in 1896 in  The Cook Book by Oscar of the Waldorf . It’s worth having a look at the book as it’s an interesting piece of culinary history. Here is Oscar’s original recipe:

“Peel two raw apples and cut them into small pieces, say about half an inch square, also cut some celery the same way, and mix it with the apple. Be very careful not to let any seeds of the apples be mixed with it. The salad must be dressed with a good mayonnaise.”

Waldorf Salad soon became very popular and other New York restaurants put it on their menus. Adding walnuts was the inspiration of George Rector of Rector’s (The Rector Cookbook, 1928). 

I put Waldorf Salad, as a starter, on the menu of Hector’s, a French flambé restaurant I co-owned with my partner, Chris, in Paphos in the early 1980’s.

The restaurant was open in the evening for dinner. Most of the main courses and some of the  desserts were prepared by the chef (Chris) in the dining room by the side of the customer’s table. He cooked each dish ’on the lamp’ (in a shallow pan over a burner) then gave it the the final dramatic flourish. He would set the contents of the pan alight with alcohol, usually brandy, then like a magician, douse the dancing flames with cream.  

It was flamboyant and sometimes spectacular, especially when he used too much alcohol and the pan resembled a small towering inferno.  But the whole experience never failed to please the customers – the individual attention and the hint of excitement.

Everything was always under control and there were no major casualties just minor ones like the dessert I was flambéing one evening. Bananas, halved lenthways, soft and lightly coloured were lying in a sauce of golden caramel with a hint of brandy, waiting to be lifted onto the plate. They smelled wonderful.  As I  switched off the burner and turned to lift a dessert plate from the table , I brushed against the handle of the pan which crashed to the floor dispatching sticky bananas and hot caramel sauce on to the carpet. I could have wept.

Here is the recipe for

Hector’s Waldorf Salad (Serves 4 as a starter and 2 for lunch)

  • 4 tbsp good quality mayonnaise
  • 2 tbsp Greek yoghurt
  • 2 red-skinned eating apples, cored and cut into small chunks (do not peel)
  • 4 sticks celery, sliced
  • Handful of walnuts, broken
  • Handful of sultanas
  • Squeeze of lemon
  • Crisp Cos or Romaine lettuce leaves (optional)
  1. Make the dressing by mixing the mayonnaise and yoghurt together until smooth and creamy with no lumps. You may have to add a drop or two of cold water at this stage until it’s the consistency of thick double cream.
  2. Before you begin, reserve a few walnut pieces and sultanas for garnish.
  3. In a bowl, mix the apples, celery, walnuts and sultanas.
  4. Add the dressing and a sqeeze of lemon juice.
  5. Mix well and taste.
  6. Add more lemon juice, if needed.
  7. Sprinkle the walnuts and sultanas over the salad and serve on small plates either as it is or with a few crisp lettuce leaves.

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cracked Green Olives

Posted on by
3

Photograph by Moira Beaton

Olives

Love them or hate them, in the Middle East and Cyprus, they appear on the table at practically every meal. I can’t remember when I first tasted olives, but I know I didn’t like them. The first ones I tried were small, black and bitter. I thought all olives would taste the same and decided that I would never eat them. That changed when I knew that I was going to be living in the Middle East. So, I set about learning to like them.  After all, I thought, olives had been around for 6,000 years; some of the trees were hundreds of years old; and there were so many varieties of olives that surely I could find at least one that I could tolerate. I’m glad I persevered because if I hadn’t, I would have missed out on one of the great pleasures of eating, and now I can’t get enough of them.

Olives come in a variety of colours, from dense black to  ‘olive green’ with various shades of purple, brown, pink and red in between.  Some people think that black and green olives come from different trees. They don’t, they grow on the same trees – black olives are just green olives that have been left on the tree to ripen.

Cyprus Olives

When I lived in Cyprus, one of my favourite lunches, was a piece of bread ripped from a newly-baked  ‘village’ loaf and eaten with a chunk of
Kephalotiri cheese and a few long, purple Kalamata olives or elies tsakistes (cracked green olives) that have been dressed with olive oil, lemon, garlic and coriander. Although these olives could be bought ready-made in Cyprus, not long after I moved into the village, my neighbour, Tassoulla, showed me how to make them using olives from her own tree.

First of all, I needed 2 stones – 1 large and  1 small, and I should take my time and choose them carefully as stones are useful for bashing all sorts of things, like olives and almonds and carobs. I searched and found my stones in our garden. One was large, flat and smooth; the other was small and rounded and could fit comfortably in the palm of my hand. After Tassoulla had approved them, I had to scrub them clean then let them dry in the sun. When they were dry, I sat on the doorstep at the back door, rested the large stone on the ground and placed a single green olive on top of it. Tassoulla showed me how to crack the olive. Too soft a hit and it wouldn’t open, too hard and it would be pulverised. 

After I had managed to crack most of them and ruin the rest, I had to place them in a large, glass jar and cover them with water. After 5 or 6 days, changing the water every day, they were ready for the next stage – brining. We boiled salt and water together to make the brine. Tassoulla measured most things by eye and I was intrigued when halfway through the process, she dropped a whole egg into the brine, tutted and added more salt, bit by bit, until the egg floated to the surface – then she stopped and removed the  egg -the brine was salty enough.

The last stage involved pouring off the water and replacing it with the brine, tucking a few slices of lemon between the olives in the jar and covering them with a couple of vine leaves. Now I had green olives, sitting on my shelf, whenever I needed them. All I had to do was take a few out of the jar, rinse them in cold water and add olive oil, garlic and coriander.  There’s no need to go through all that if you want to make these at home as you can buy the olives ready-cracked and all you need to do is add the dressing. Here is the recipe:

Elies Tsakistes (Cracked Green Olives)

Take 150gr cracked green olives (or, if you can’t find any, you can buy medium-sized green olives and crack them yourself with a rolling pin – they still taste delicious), rinse them in cold water and place them in a bowl. Next, roughly crush 1/2 – 1 tbsp whole coriander seeds, either with a pestle and mortar or a rolling pin (cover them with clingfilm first or put them in a plastic bag first) and add them to the bowl with a crushed clove of garlic, 2 tbsp olive oil and a good squeeze of lemon. Mix them until the olives are glistening and covered with flecks of coriander seeds. You can put them in a jar or a bowl (covered) and keep them in the fridge until you need them, if you can wait that long to eat them.  Serve them as a snack, with drinks, or as part of a mezze. Or just place a few olives on a plate with some of the oil, dip a piece of warm pitta bread or any good bread into the oil, and scoop up an olive with the bread. Delicious.