Cooking With Mom (Heleane de Quilettes)

Sweet Red Hot Chili Sauce . . . Sambal

© Debby Alten, 2009

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Article: How To Turn A Dutch Salad Into A Meal

Women who have experienced the suffering of war will tell you that the one thing they learned was to never waste one grain or morsel of food. Nothing should be thrown away and left-overs shall be tomorrow's masterpieces.

Take a look at the unusual combination of ingredients in this Dutch salad (called Huzarensla) with an Indonesian touch: pineapple chunks, fried onions with sugar, potatoes, vinegar, hard boiled eggs, pineapple juice and peas etc. The Dutch used their left-over meat like chicken or ham while the Indo people eventually liked the taste of steak much better.


Huzarensla

Ingredients:

1 lb. steak (or more and use your favorite), cook with 5 cubes of beef bouillon and a dash of pepper in about 8 Tbsp. of butter
2 1/2 large onions, diced
3 (20 oz) cans pineapple chunks
12 eggs, hard-boiled--crumble with a fork
quarter C. pineapple juice (Mom uses 1 1/2 Cups juice)
2 (15oz) can shoestring beets (don't throw away the juice)
1 C. sugar
2 (15oz) cans cut green beans
2 (15oz) cans peas
salt and pepper to taste
2 lbs of fresh carrots, cooked, sliced and chopped some more
2 Tbsp. mustard
24 oz jar of pickles (Dill Kosher), sliced
1 (30 fl. oz) jar of Best Food Mayonnaise
10 potatoes, cooked*
White Vinegar to taste
Pineapple salad vinegar to taste
Grape oil or butter

*Boil the potatoes in skin, then peel when done. Don't overcook. Cut into small cubed chunks.

Preparation:

In large frying pan cook steak in the butter. Take out of the pan and cut into generous bite-size pieces. Set aside. Fry the onions in the juices of the steak for just about a half minute. Remove from heat. Add sugar, eggs, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegars.

In a very large bowl, place the pineapple chunks with pineapple juice and add all the vegetables. Mix well. Gently add the egg and sugar/onion mixture and mix well again. When steak is cooled throw that in last. Use the beet juice for coloring. This salad is supposed to look red. Refrigerate overnight. Serve over romaine lettuce leaves. This will serve over 20 people.

Huzarensla is a traditional Dutch potato salad. However, the Indo people (Dutch-Indonesian) have creatively added their own touches and turned this salad into a meal of its own. For the most part, after World War II when money was scarce, women in Indonesia added whatever they had to the pot.

What was even more unusual, and delightfully so for the pallet, was that nothing was wasted. This included all of the pineapple juice from the cans, the fat portion (not recommended, but it's yummy) from the steak and all its juices. The onions are fried in the steak's juices and the egg mixture was thrown in the toss.

In any case, you will find that in the Dutch recipe there are only about half the ingredients and the method of preparation is slightly different. For the most part nothing except the potatoes and eggs is cooked (unless of course you count the meat which was a left-over) and they have excluded the delicious egg salad mixture. It is after all a Dutch potato salad which our Indo moms and grandmas were forced to re-create using anything and everything at their disposal because of a war they were never meant to suffer through.


All photographs © Debby Alten, 2009
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