Drain 1 cup of shrimps and 1 can of sardines; cut into small pieces. Add 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 small onion, a few capers and gherkins chopped fine and chopped parsley. Mix with ¼ cup of vinegar. Line the salad bowl with the crisp lettuce leaves. Add the salad and pour over a mayonnaise dressing and serve.
A composed canned-fish salad of the sort that filled the middle pages of American cookbooks once tinned shrimp and sardines became reliable pantry goods. It needs almost no cooking, but the proportions want attention.
- The hinge: drain hard, then drain againBoth the shrimp and the sardines carry brine or oil, and either will slacken the mayonnaise into soup. Tip them into a sieve, blot on paper towel, and do the same with the capers and gherkins.
- A cup of shrimpsThat is roughly 6 oz drained, or one 5-6 oz can of small cooked shrimp. Frozen cooked salad shrimp, thawed and dried, work better than canned.
- One can of sardinesAt the time that meant a flat quarter-pound tin of small sardines in oil; modern tins run about 3.75 oz. Buy skinless and boneless if you want the fish to disappear into the salad; bone-in sardines are edible but will be noticed.
- The vinegar is a marinade, not a dressingA quarter cup poured over ten ounces of fish is a great deal of acid by modern taste. Toss the fish and vegetables with it, let them sit ten minutes, then drain off whatever pools before the mayonnaise goes on. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than distilled.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe dressing was most likely homemade, whether boiled or hand-beaten, and probably thinner and sharper than the jarred kind. Loosen commercial mayonnaise with a spoonful of the drained vinegar and a little lemon juice to get closer to the intended consistency.
- OnionOne small raw onion chopped fine is assertive against this quantity of fish. A shallot or two tablespoons of finely minced sweet onion, rinsed under cold water, keeps the bite without dominating.
- Chill before servingFifteen to twenty minutes in the refrigerator firms the salad and lets the flavors settle. Line the bowl with lettuce only at the last moment or the leaves wilt.
- YieldEnough for four as a first course or light lunch, two as a main salad.
Cookbooks of this kind often assigned nationalities loosely, and this looks like a fair example: what makes the salad Polish in the compiler's mind is chiefly the vinegar, the capers and the gherkins, the sharp pickled register that American readers associated with Central and Eastern European cooking. Polish tradition does have a real family of bound vegetable-and-protein salads, the sałatka, often dressed with mayonnaise and studded with pickled cucumber and hard-boiled egg, so the instinct is not baseless even if the shrimp and sardines are an American pantry substitution. Canned sardines and canned shrimp were cheap and shelf-stable, and it is easy to see why a compiler reaching for a "foreign" salad would build one on them.