Cut some pickled herring into pieces and mix with flaked lax, 2 peeled apples and 2 boiled potatoes. Cut into dice pieces; add some chopped shallots and gherkins; sprinkle with finely minced tarragon and chervil, salt and pepper. Cover with a plain salad dressing.
January 15 — No. 15
Norwegian
A terse ingredient list rather than a method, in the style of the whole book. Everything here is bought ready-cured, so the work is dicing and balancing.
- "Lax"Scandinavian laks — salmon, in practice cured or cold-smoked rather than fresh. Smoked salmon trimmings or gravlax both work; flake or slice it into ribbons rather than cubing it.
- Pickled herringUse jarred herring in plain vinegar brine, not the cream or mustard sauces, which will muddy the dressing. Drain well and blot, or the salad turns watery within the hour.
- "Plain salad dressing"In a book of this period this most likely means a plain oil-and-vinegar (French) dressing with salt and pepper rather than mayonnaise; a common ratio is about three parts oil to one of vinegar. Some Norwegian versions use sour cream instead; that is a different dish, though a good one.
- ProportionsNone are given beyond the apples and potatoes. A workable balance is about 200 g herring, 150 g salmon, the 2 apples and 2 potatoes, with a tablespoon each of shallot and gherkin.
- Potatoes and applesBoil waxy potatoes the day before and chill them so the dice hold their shape. A firm tart apple is wanted; toss it in a little of the dressing at once so it does not brown.
- ChervilRarely stocked and short-lived. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of extra tarragon is the usual substitute; do not simply double the tarragon, which will take over.
- RestingDress it and leave it 30 minutes to an hour in the refrigerator so the vinegar draws the flavours together, then check the seasoning again — cold blunts salt.
- YieldNone is stated. On the quantities suggested above it would make roughly four modest first courses, or six as part of a cold table with rye bread and butter.
Herring salad in one form or another is the backbone of the Scandinavian cold table, and versions of it turn up under Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German and Russian names throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks — the combination of salt fish, boiled potato, apple and pickled cucumber is common to all of them, with beetroot added in the versions that come out pink. Its logic is preservation: herring barrelled in brine and salmon cured or smoked were winter staples of the North Sea and Baltic coasts long before refrigeration, and the apple and vinegar are there to cut the salt. What marks this particular entry as a product of its book is the finish — tarragon and chervil belong to the fines herbes vocabulary of the French professional kitchen, and one might doubt that a home cook in Bergen would have reached for chervil. The entry belongs to a popular genre of the period, the day-by-day menu book, which promised the American housekeeper a year of variety by handing her a foreign name and a short paragraph.