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Salad, Swedish
Take a pickled herring, remove the skin and bones, cut the flesh into dice, and mix with it its bulk in cold cooked beef, boiled potatoes, and sour juicy apples, all cut up small. Add four anchovies, previously soaked in milk or water for a short time, freed from skin and bone, and torn into flakes, a table-spoonful of well-drained capers, a table-spoonful of pickled gherkins chopped small, a table-spoonful of chopped tarragon-leaves, two table-spoonfuls of chopped chervil, and twenty stoned olives. Mix these ingredients lightly, add some salad dressing of oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt, and season the preparation rather highly. If liked, the anchovies may be omitted and a dozen or more of freshly-opened oysters may be laid upon the mixture.
A composed herring salad of the Scandinavian type, built on equal bulk of four main ingredients rather than measured weights. The only real decisions are which pickled herring to buy and how sharp to make the dressing.
- "Its bulk in"The instruction means equal volumes: one herring's worth of diced flesh, then the same volume each of cold beef, boiled potato and apple. The recipe fixes no total quantity or number of servings; scale from the size of the herring you have.
- Which herringBuy plain salt-cured or vinegar-pickled herring, not the cream-sauce or mustard-sauce jars, which will fight the dressing. Skin and bone come away easily; taste a scrap first and rinse the fillet briefly if it is aggressively salty.
- AnchoviesThe soaking in milk assumes salt-packed anchovies, which need it. Oil-packed fillets from a tin do not; use four of them, drained and torn, and skip the soak.
- Apples"Sour juicy" means a sharp cooking or eating apple with real acidity - Bramley, Granny Smith, a firm russet. A sweet modern supermarket apple leaves the salad flat.
- Potato and beefWaxy potatoes, boiled and cooled completely before dicing, or they crumble in the mixing. Cold roast or boiled beef is the point of the dish - it was written for leftovers - and it should be trimmed and cut to the same small dice as everything else.
- Chervil and tarragonBoth are still sold fresh, though chervil can be hard to find; flat parsley with a little extra tarragon is the usual stand-in. Two tablespoons of chopped chervil is a generous handful of leaves, so buy the bunch rather than a supermarket clamshell.
- The dressingNo proportions are given; something in the region of three parts oil to one part vinegar is a common nineteenth-century ratio, though period recipes vary widely, so mix to taste. Season "rather highly" but taste before salting at all, as the herring, anchovies, capers and olives are all salty.
- Mixing and restingFold rather than stir - the potato and apple are meant to stay in distinct cubes. Half an hour in the refrigerator lets the dressing penetrate; much longer and the apple softens and weeps.
- The oystersIf you use the oyster version, shuck them and lay them on at the moment of serving; they are eaten raw, so buy from a source you trust and skip them for anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised.
This is recognisably sillsalad, the herring salad often said to anchor a Swedish smörgåsbord, arriving in an English cookery dictionary at the point when Victorian editors were cataloguing continental dishes under national labels - "Salad, Swedish" appears in Cassell's as a type rather than a specific household recipe. The structure is the durable one: cured herring cut with potato, apple and cold meat, sharpened with pickles and a vinaigrette, a way of making a small quantity of preserved fish feed a table. Swedish versions generally include pickled beetroot, which turns the whole thing pink and is conspicuously absent here; the tarragon, chervil and stoned olives point instead to the idea being adapted for English readers. The cold beef and boiled potatoes mark it as a dish for the day after a joint.