Mix highly seasoned cold cooked rice with some grated onion, chopped parsley and chives; add 2 dozen fine cut French sardines. Put on crisp lettuce leaves in a salad bowl and cover with a mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with thin shreds of red beets, and serve.
December 5 — No. 5
Egyptian
A composed rice salad of the kind that filled the salad chapters of turn-of-the-century books, written for cooks who already had cold rice in the larder. The quantities are almost entirely left to judgment, so fix the rice first and scale from there.
- Set the rice quantity yourselfThe original gives none. About 3 cups of cooked, cooled long-grain rice (1 cup raw) balances 24 small sardines and serves four as a light lunch course.
- "Highly seasoned" means acid, not just salt"Highly seasoned" is left undefined -- read it generously. Season the cold rice with salt, pepper and, if you like, a spoonful or two of vinegar or lemon juice before anything else goes in. Cold rice absorbs seasoning poorly once it is bound with mayonnaise, so do it while the grains are still loose.
- French sardinesThese were true sardines (pilchard), packed in olive oil and sold in flat tins. Two dozen small fish will take several standard tins, so buy generously. Drain them well and lift out the backbones if they are large; "fine cut" means chopped into short pieces rather than mashed.
- Grated onionThe recipe calls for grated rather than chopped onion, which releases juice that seasons the rice throughout. One small onion is enough for 3 cups of rice, and a milder sweet or spring onion suits the oily fish better than a strong yellow one.
- Chives and parsleyUse flat-leaf parsley, chopped, about 3 tablespoons, with 2 tablespoons of snipped chives. Add both at the last moment so they stay green against the white rice.
- Mayonnaise as a cover, not a binderThe instruction is to cover the mound, not to fold the dressing through. Spoon a thick mayonnaise over the top so the shape holds; thinning it will slump the salad into the lettuce.
- The beet garnishCooked beets, cut in fine julienne. Cut and add them at the table or just before serving, or the red will bleed into the mayonnaise within minutes.
- Serving temperatureAssemble cold and serve cold. Rice salads dressed with mayonnaise and left standing at room temperature are best kept under an hour; refrigerate the components separately if you build it ahead.
The name here is decorative rather than geographic. This book runs a dish a day and labels each with a nation, so "Egyptian" signals the general Levantine and North African associations that rice, onion and preserved fish carried for Anglo-American cooks around 1900 rather than any documented Cairo original. What the recipe really records is the era's enthusiasm for the composed salad: cold cooked starch, a tinned fish, a cloak of mayonnaise and a contrasting garnish, arranged on lettuce and presented as a set piece. Tinned sardines from the Breton and Atlantic canning ports were a cheap luxury in that period, reliably stocked and reliably good, which is why so many salad recipes of the time reach for them; "French sardines" seems to have functioned as a quality claim as much as a description. The shreds of red beet do the same work as the truffle and pimiento strips in fancier books of the decade, supplying color at a time when a salad was judged first by how it looked in the bowl.