Salmon Salad
-Mrs. D. L. Wells.
Remove the bone and parts of the skin from one can of salmon. Mince very fine, and add to it one pint of finely chopped cabbage, one cupful of chopped pickle, three hard-boiled eggs chopped fine. To one pint of boiling vinegar add salt, pepper, sugar and mustard to taste. Pour this over the salmon and cabbage and garnish the dish with curled parsley or lettuce leaves.
A canned-salmon slaw dressed with hot vinegar rather than mayonnaise — sturdy, sharp, and closer to a German-style salad than to what most people now mean by salmon salad.
- Balance the dressing before it hits the bowlA full pint of boiling vinegar is a great deal of acid for this quantity of fish and cabbage. Season and taste it in the pan first, and add only enough to moisten the salad; whether the original intended all of it to be absorbed or partly drained off is not clear from the wording.
- Canned salmon then and nowTurn-of-the-century cans held the fish with skin and vertebrae intact, hence the instruction to pick them out. The bones are soft and edible, though removing them gives a smoother texture; a modern 14.75 oz can is the nearest equivalent to the period one-pound tin, or use two 6 oz cans of skinless boneless fillet if you would rather skip the sorting.
- Pint means volume, not weightOne pint of chopped cabbage is about 2 cups packed, roughly a quarter of a small head. Shred it fine on a mandoline or with a knife rather than a food processor, which bruises it into water.
- "Chopped pickle"In this period this usually means cucumber pickle in vinegar and spice — a sour gherkin or dill rather than a sweet bread-and-butter chip, though mixed pickle is also possible. A cup is a lot; start with half and adjust.
- MustardDry mustard powder was common in kitchens of this period and dissolves readily in the hot vinegar. A teaspoon is enough to register; prepared mustard works but brings its own vinegar and salt.
- Pouring hot dressingThe boiling vinegar lightly wilts the cabbage and helps the seasoning penetrate the fish. Toss immediately; the recipe does not say, but the lettuce-and-parsley garnish suggests it was served cool, so chilling an hour lets the flavours settle.
- YieldEnough for six as a side salad, or four as a light lunch course. It keeps two or three days refrigerated and grows sharper as it sits.
Salmon salad appears often in community cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s for one reason: canned Pacific salmon had become cheap and widely available. Canneries on the Columbia and Fraser rivers were shipping tinned fish across the continent by rail, and a pantry can of salmon became a standard emergency protein in inland households that would otherwise rarely see the fish. Dressing it with hot spiced vinegar rather than mayonnaise belongs to the older tradition of vinegar-based dressings, which were in use well before commercial mayonnaise and kept better in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration. The attribution to Mrs. D. L. Wells is typical of the subscription cookbooks of the era, in which recipes were gathered from named contributors — often church or club members — and printed with credit, making the books as much a social register as a kitchen manual.