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Salad Dressing for Fish Salad
Rub the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs till smooth. Add a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, a tea-spoonful of sugar, half a tea-spoonful of salt, a pinch of cayenne, a pinch of white pepper, and two sardines from which the skin and bones have been removed, or instead of the sardines use a spoonful of bruised capers and a minced shallot. When these ingredients are thoroughly incorporated, add very gradually two table-spoonfuls of thick cream, a table-spoonful of tarragon vinegar, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice.
A cooked-yolk dressing of the older English school, thickened by egg and cream rather than emulsified oil. The whole thing comes together in a bowl with a spoon in about five minutes.
- The hinge: sieve the yolks"Rub till smooth" means pressing the cooked yolks through a fine sieve or mashing them to a powder-fine paste before anything wet goes in. Any lumps left at this stage will never disperse, and the dressing turns grainy.
- Mixed mustardNot dry mustard powder but mustard already made up with liquid — an English-style prepared mustard is the closest match. If using powder, slake a scant teaspoon with a little water and let it stand ten minutes.
- Add the cream slowly"Very gradually" is doing real work: the cream is being beaten into a stiff paste, and dumping it in leaves you with speckled liquid. Work in a spoonful at a time until the mixture is smooth, then the vinegar and lemon juice last.
- Thick creamPeriod "thick cream" is roughly modern heavy or double cream, unwhipped. Something lighter will give a thinner dressing.
- SardinesOil-packed tins are fine; drain them, and lift out the backbone and skin as directed, then mash to a paste with the yolks rather than adding them whole later.
- The caper and shallot variant"Bruised" capers means crushed, not merely chopped, so their brine spreads through the base. The recipe says only "a spoonful," without specifying which; a spoonful of capers with a finely minced shallot gives a sharper dressing than the sardine version.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a few sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar with a pinch of chopped tarragon is an acceptable substitute.
- YieldAbout half a cup — enough to dress fish salad for four. It is thick enough to fold through flaked cooked fish; thin it with a teaspoon more cream if you want it pourable. Keep refrigerated and use within two days.
Cassell's sits in the long English tradition of hard-yolk salad dressings, which predate the general adoption of oil-and-egg mayonnaise in domestic kitchens: cooked yolk pounded with mustard, sugar, vinegar and cream appears in English receipt books of the period. The sardine here is the fish-salad equivalent of an anchovy in a meat sauce \\ a cheap tinned source of salt and savour, and tinned sardines were widely available and inexpensive in Britain by roughly the 1870s and 80s, when this dictionary was assembled. The alternative of capers and shallot points at the same effect by a different route, and the presence of tarragon vinegar and cayenne on the same short list shows how thoroughly the Victorian store cupboard had absorbed a range of flavourings.