Fish Salad
Take a pound of cold boiled lake trout; shred into pieces an inch in length. Make a dressing of the yolks of three eggs, rubbed to a smooth paste with salad oil; add one teaspoonful of salt, one of pepper, one tablespoonful of made mustard, one of sugar, and lastly six tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Beat the mixture until light, and just before pouring it over the fish, stir in lightly the frothed white of a raw egg. Put in your dish with six tablespoonfuls of vinegar and half the dressing stirred in with it; spread the remaining over the top, and lay blanched lettuce leaves around the edges, to be eaten with it -Mrs. S. S. Roddis.
CHAPTER XIII.
A cold-fish salad in the older style, dressed with an egg-and-oil sauce rather than a modern emulsified mayonnaise. Two things need decoding before you start: what the yolks are and how sharp the finished dish will be.
- The yolks are almost certainly cookedThe yolks are probably cooked -- Yolks that can be "rubbed to a smooth paste" with oil are most likely hard-boiled yolks pressed through a sieve, a familiar base for nineteenth-century egg dressings; the later reference to "the frothed white of a raw egg" implies the earlier eggs were not raw, though the recipe never says so outright. Only that white is unambiguously raw; if that concerns you, use a pasteurized egg or leave it out, as its job is lightness rather than flavour.
- Salad oil, unmeasured"Salad oil" means a bland oil; olive and cottonseed were both sold for the purpose in this period. The recipe never states a quantity, which is genuinely ambiguous; work in oil a spoonful at a time until three sieved yolks form a smooth, spreadable paste, roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from the jar, not dry mustard powder. Substituting powder tablespoon for tablespoon will make the dressing violently hot and bitter.
- Twelve tablespoons of vinegar is a lotSix go into the dressing and six more are poured over the fish in the dish — three quarters of a cup in total for one pound of trout. Even by the standards of the period this is bracing. Start with half and taste; a mild cider or white wine vinegar behaves better here than distilled.
- Scale back the pepperA full teaspoon of pepper against a single pound of fish reads as a transcription habit rather than an intention. A quarter teaspoon, adjusted at the end, sits better with delicate lake trout.
- Blanched lettuce leavesBlanched in the gardener's sense — the pale, tender inner leaves of a head, shielded from light — not lettuce dipped in boiling water. Use romaine hearts or butter lettuce.
- The fishLake trout is oily and firm and holds up to vinegar; if it is not available, use another firm cold-poached fish such as char, salmon or steelhead. Flake along the grain into inch pieces rather than chopping, and dress it while cold.
- Yield and servingA pound of fish dressed this richly serves four as a lunch or supper salad. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep it refrigerated; the vinegar will begin to break down the flakes if it stands longer.
Lake trout was a commercial staple of the Great Lakes fishery through the second half of the nineteenth century, shipped inland on ice in quantity, and cold boiled trout was the kind of leftover such a dish assumes. The dressing belongs to an older family than mayonnaise: sieved hard yolks worked to a paste with oil, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, is a method English and American books had been printing as "salad dressing" for decades before the whisked raw-yolk emulsion became standard in home kitchens. The attribution to Mrs. S. S. Roddis is typical of the compiled community cookbook, where recipes were solicited from named contributors and printed as received, quantities, quirks and all.