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Fish Salad
This consists of cold fish of any kind, mixed with well dried salad, pickled gherkins, or any other green pickle. Oysters or shrimps may be added to the other fish, which should be separated neatly into flakes, and the whole should be moistened with a salad cream. Garnish with slices of lemon and some parsley.
A frame rather than a formula, in the manner of Cassell's shorter entries: cold cooked fish, dressed greens, something sharp, something creamy. The success of it rests almost entirely on how dry the leaves are and how coarsely the fish is broken.
- "Well dried salad"Salad here means the leaves, not the finished dish, and drying them is the hinge of the recipe. Water clinging to lettuce thins the dressing to a puddle at the bottom of the bowl; spin or towel the leaves until they squeak.
- Salad creamIn a book of this date this means a made dressing, not the bottled sweet-vinegar product sold under that name today. It would typically have been a mayonnaise or a boiled dressing along the lines of egg yolk, mustard, vinegar and cream, thinner and sharper than modern jarred salad cream.
- Which fishThe recipe allows cold fish of any kind; firm, plainly cooked white fish or salmon suits it best -- turbot, cod, halibut, haddock, brill. Oily cured fish and anything sauced will fight the dressing. Cold poached or leftover baked fish both work.
- FlakingSeparate the flesh along its natural flakes with the fingers and pick out pin bones and skin as you go. Chopping or forking it into shreds gives a pasty texture once the cream goes on.
- Oysters and shrimpsVictorian kitchens would often have used bottled or barrelled oysters here. If you add raw ones, buy from a source you trust and eat the salad the same day; small cooked cold-water shrimp are the easier addition.
- Green pickleGherkins are named; pickled capers or nasturtium seeds are other possibilities. Slice them thinly and use them as seasoning rather than bulk -- the recipe gives no quantity, so add to taste.
- Assembly and yieldThe recipe simply moistens the whole with salad cream; dressing the leaves lightly first and folding the fish in at the last moment helps keep the flakes intact. No quantities are given, but roughly a pound of cooked fish with a head of lettuce would serve four as a light main or six as a first course.
- KeepingDressed fish salad does not hold. Make it within an hour of serving, keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table, and do not save leftovers overnight.
Cold fish salad belongs to the Victorian cold table: the supper sideboard, the luncheon spread, the picnic hamper, all of which ran on yesterday's boiled turbot and salmon. Large fish were bought and cooked whole, so remains were presumably common in a well-run household, and cookery dictionaries like Cassell's gave their readers a repertoire of ways to present them again without appearing to serve leftovers. The formula is deliberately loose because it was meant to absorb whatever the larder held, and the lemon and parsley garnish is often said to have signalled that a dish is fish. Salad cream itself was a domestic preparation at this date, a cooked or uncooked egg-and-vinegar dressing made in the kitchen; the commercially bottled version that now owns the name is a twentieth-century development.