Cut cold cooked fish into small pieces and mix with chopped hard-boiled eggs, a few sliced olives, capers and gherkins. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Line the salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves; add the salad and cover with a mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with aspic, cut into dice pieces and serve cold.
A leftover-fish salad of the kind that filled the cold-supper page of nearly every early twentieth-century international cookbook. The recipe assumes you already have poached fish, hard-boiled eggs and a pan of aspic on hand, so the work is mostly assembly.
- The fish is the hingeUse firm cooked white fish or salmon that flakes into recognisable pieces rather than shredding to paste; cod, haddock, halibut and salmon all work. Chill it thoroughly and drain off any cooking liquid before mixing, or the mayonnaise will thin and slide off the lettuce.
- Quantities, since none are givenAbout 1 lb (450 g) cooked fish, 3 hard-boiled eggs, 8-10 olives, a tablespoon of capers and two or three gherkins makes four servings as a first course or a light lunch. Chop the pickled elements small: they season the dish, and whole capers or thick gherkin slices dominate.
- MayonnaiseA period cook may well have whisked it fresh with oil and a raw yolk, though bottled mayonnaise was also available by this date. Jarred mayonnaise is fine here and avoids the raw-egg question; loosen it with a spoonful of lemon juice or the cold fish liquor so it coats rather than clings in lumps.
- The aspic garnishThis means clear savoury jelly, traditionally from fish or veal stock, set firm in a shallow pan and cut into cubes. A well-reduced fish or chicken stock set with about 1 tablespoon powdered gelatine per 2 cups liquid gives a jelly firm enough to dice cleanly; chill at least four hours. The garnish is decorative and can simply be left out.
- GherkinsIn this period gherkins are small vinegar-pickled cucumbers, closer to a French cornichon than to a sweet American pickle. Sweet gherkins will push the salad in an unintended direction.
- Assemble late, serve coldDress the fish no more than an hour before serving and keep it refrigerated; lettuce leaves wilt under mayonnaise, and cooked fish left dressed at room temperature is the one real risk in an otherwise simple dish.
Cold fish bound with mayonnaise and sharpened with capers, olives and pickles is a standard "national salad" formula that turn-of-the-century compilers are often said to have attached to a range of cuisines — Sweden, Russia, Italy or Spain — depending on the page. The Swedish label is not arbitrary, though: Scandinavian cold tables have long featured poached and cured fish with eggs, pickled cucumber and dill, and the Russian and Swedish fish salads that Anglo-American cookbooks borrowed in this period are commonly traced, if not demonstrably, to that smorgasbord tradition. The dish also reflects a practical fact about the era's kitchens: a book offering a dish a day for a year needed recipes that turned yesterday's dinner into today's.