Clock Salad: a Cold Platter for New Year's Eve
A round platter arranged as a clock face, with twelve slices of hard-boiled egg marking the hours and strips of raw carrot for the hands. It comes from Sister Bernarda — Florentina Seitz, an Argentine nun of a Swiss congregation whose cookbook sold 200,000 copies in 2003 — and explains how a Central European cold platter ended up on Argentine New Year tables. It is not a Russian salad: it has tuna, Gruyère, gherkin and a horseradish and yoghurt dressing.
Ingredients
- 500 g potatoes
- 250 g green beans
- 150 g Gruyère
- 1 pickled gherkin
- 1 tin of tuna in water, drained
- 12 slices of hard-boiled egg (about 3 eggs)
- 3 tbsp mayonnaise
- 1 tsp grated horseradish
- 1/2 pot of plain unsweetened yoghurt
- 2 tbsp chopped chives
- 1 tbsp herb vinegar
- 2 tbsp cream
- Salt and pepper
- 1 tomato and 1 raw carrot, to garnish
- Black olives and parsley
Method
- 1
Boil the potatoes in their skins until tender but firm. Peel them hot and slice them thinly once warm: cold, they break less.
- 2
Boil the beans, cut into half-centimetre pieces, for 4 to 5 minutes and drop them straight into iced water. That cold shock fixes the green; left to cool on their own they turn grey.
- 3
Dice the Gruyère and the gherkin small, and flake the tuna.
- 4
Mix the mayonnaise with the horseradish, the yoghurt, the chives, the herb vinegar and the cream. Season with salt and pepper.
- 5
⚠️ The original asks for ten tablespoons of chives against three of mayonnaise, which leaves a dressing made almost entirely of herb. Two is what works.
- 6
Fold the potatoes, beans, cheese, gherkin and tuna through the dressing with a spatula, from the bottom up, so the potato slices stay whole.
- 7
Turn it onto a round platter and smooth it into an even circle, slightly domed in the middle.
- 8
Cover with a thin layer of mayonnaise and set the twelve egg slices at the hour positions.
- 9
Make the hands from two strips of raw carrot, one longer than the other, and garnish with tomato slices, black olives and parsley.
- 10
Chill for at least an hour before serving. Cold it slices better and the dressing firms up.