Luxembourg Firestone Salad: Feierstengszalot

This salad seems to have developed in perhaps the 1600s or early 1700s as a way of using leftover beef. Lëtzebuergesch, the German dialect/language of Luxembourg, has "Feiersteng," standard German has "Feuerstein," and English has "firestone," originally as "fyrstan;" that is, "flint." The name of the dish "seems" to come from the slices of cooked beef representing, or looking like, pieces of "firestone." 

You can use leftover roast beef of any type, or you can boil or roast some beef just for this dish. When I made the salad for this article, the beef was so tender, even after being in the refrigerator overnight, that I really couldn't slice it properly, so I tore it into smaller pieces.

Often served with boiled potatoes and baguettes for a great lunch ...

 

Ingredients (4 servings): 

 

1 1/2 cups boiled or roasted beef in bite size pieces

2 to 3 hard boiled eggs, sliced

1/3 cup mild pickles, chopped

1 cup chopped onion

1/2 cup tomato, chopped or grape tomatoes halved

1/3 cup vegetable oil, regular olive oil or sunflower seed oil

1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

2 teaspoons dried tarragon

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt 

4 to 5 tablespoons heavy cream

2 to 3 tablespoons chopped parsley or chives

Cut or tear the beef into bite size pieces and put it into a bowl. Add the chopped onion, chopped pickles and chopped tomato, toss to mix. Distribute into individual salad bowls or onto individual small plates and top each with some hard boiled egg slices, then spoon some of the dressing (see further) over the salad and sprinkle each salad with some chopped chives or parsley. For the dressing: In a bowl, add the oil, mustard, tarragon, pepper, salt and cream. Whisk everything together until it thickens to the desired consistency.  

WORD HISTORY:

Firestone & Flint- Firestone is simply the combination of "fire" and "stone." For the history of the word "fire," here is the link: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2011/07/german-question-part-one-hundred_13.html

For the history of "stone," here is the link: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2010/10/german-question-part-forty-nine_27.html

 

Relatives of "firestone": German has "Feuerstein" (once spelled "fiurstein"), Low German has "Füürsteen," Dutch has "vuursteen," West Frisian "fjoerstienne" (?) 

 

"Flint" is related to "split," a word of Germanic derivation that had a form in Old English, which died out, but then was later borrowed from Low German to give us our modern word. "Flint" goes back to Indo European "splei/spley," which had the notion, "to separate from, to split off from." This produced Indo European "splind," meaning "split, cleave." This gave Old Germanic "flintaz," "seemingly" meaning "very hard stone split from rock." This gave Old English "flint," with the meaning, "hard stone," and then "hard stone that sparks to start a fire;" thus, "flint stone," a meaning that is still with us to this day. German once had "flins," "hard stone," but German used forms of modern German "Feuerstein" (fire stone), and "flins" eventually died out, Low German had "vlint" and "vlintsten;" that is, "flint stone" in the Middle Ages, but apparently these have died out, and the same happened to Dutch "vlint." Danish has "flint," perhaps from Danish (or is it a borrowing from English, or perhaps a refashioning of the Low German form? Danish and Low German have had much interaction over the centuries, including up to the present). Swedish has "flinta," and German borrowed "Flinte" from Swedish in the 1600s as the word for a flintlock musket, where the gunpowder for firing was ignited by flint striking a piece of metal (called a 'frizzen').