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Sardine Salad
Take any cold dressed fish. Free it from skin and bone, and tear it into flakes. Put a layer of it in the centre of a dish, and sprinkle lightly over it a small portion of minced gherkins and bruised capers. Place on this a layer of sliced German sausage, and arrange on the top of the pile sardines split into halves and freed from bone and skin. Cut lettuce-hearts into quarters, place these round the salad, and garnish the dish with hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters lengthwise. At the moment of serving, pour over the salad a sauce prepared as follows. Take the flesh of three sardines freed from skin and gristle. Rub this in a mortar to a smooth paste with the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs; and add a pinch of cayenne, a grate of nutmeg, and two table-spoonfuls each of oil, vinegar, and light wine. Add the ingredients slowly, and beat the sauce well between every addition.
A composed salad of leftovers, built in layers and dressed at the table. Nothing here is difficult, but the assembly and the sauce both reward attention.
- The hinge is the sauceThe sardine-and-yolk paste will split if the oil and vinegar go in fast. Add a teaspoon at a time and beat thoroughly between additions, exactly as written; the pounded yolk is the only emulsifier you have. A small food processor works, but stop as soon as it is smooth.
- "Cold dressed fish"Dressed means cooked, not sauced. Any leftover poached or baked white fish, salmon or trout will do. Use fish cooked within the last day and kept refrigerated throughout; this dish is assembled cold and never reheated.
- German sausageIn a Victorian English kitchen this meant a large, coarse sausage sold to be eaten cold in slices, often smoked; period books gloss it loosely, sometimes alongside Bologna sausage. A mortadella, Lyoner or bologna is the nearest supermarket equivalent; slice it thin.
- Bruised capersCrushed lightly with the flat of a knife or the pestle so they release their brine, rather than left whole. Rinse salt-packed capers first.
- "Light wine"Most likely a light table wine; a dry white works, though a light claret would also fit the period sense of the phrase. The two tablespoons are there to loosen the sauce and lift the sardine. Vermouth is too aromatic; sherry too heavy.
- Lettuce-heartsThe dense pale centres of Cos or Little Gem. Two heads of Little Gem quartered will ring a dish nicely, and they hold their shape under the dressing better than loose leaves.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities except three sardines and two yolks for the sauce, so scale the pile to the cold fish you have. Build it shortly before serving and keep it cold; sauce it only at the table, or the lettuce collapses.
The recipe reads less as a fish dish than as a lesson in the salade composuilt built on cold roast or boiled remains and made presentable by garnish and a strong sauce. Tinned sardines in oil were one of the great cheap luxuries of the later nineteenth century egin canneries in Brittany and around Nantes shipped them across the Channel, and a tin was a familiar supper standby in English larders. What the recipe really demonstrates is the use of pounded hard-boiled yolk as a binder, a technique often said to be older than the whisked mayonnaise and one that survives in sauces like gribiche and in the filling of devilled eggs. The German sausage layer reflects the trade in imported Continental charcuterie into Victorian Britain, sold by Italian and German warehousemen.