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Fish Salad
Chop when cold three large boiled potatoes, and mix with fish.
Rub smooth three hard-boiled eggs; season with pepper, salt and mustard, add a tablespoon of cream and a gill of vinegar. Pour over the salmon.
— Miss Annie Gardner
A contributed receipt written for someone who already knew what a fish salad was, so quantities for the fish itself are simply left out. Read it as a dressing formula to be scaled against whatever cold cooked salmon you have.
- A gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, which is a great deal of acid against one tablespoon of cream. Start with a quarter cup, taste, and add more.
- How much fishThree large boiled potatoes suggest roughly a pound to a pound and a half of cooked, flaked salmon — one large can, or a poached tail-end fillet. The proportions work at about equal volumes of fish and potato.
- "Mix with fish," then "pour over the salmon"The fish and salmon are the same thing. Fold the potato through the fish, then pour the dressing over the combined mixture and turn it gently.
- Rub smoothMeans press the hard-boiled yolks and whites through a sieve or mash them to a paste with the back of a spoon, so the dressing thickens rather than sitting in lumps. Working the yolks with the mustard and a little of the vinegar first gives the smoothest result.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than a prepared condiment, though the receipt does not say. Half a teaspoon is plenty for this quantity, and it needs a few minutes wet to develop its heat.
- CreamHeavy or whipping cream. A single tablespoon is there to soften the vinegar, not to make a creamy dressing.
- PotatoesBoil them in their skins and peel while warm so they stay firm; a waxy variety holds its shape in the mixing. Chop only when fully cold, as the receipt insists, or they break down.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a luncheon dish. Best dressed at least an hour ahead and kept cold, and it should not be held more than a day.
The unstated assumption here is very likely canned salmon. Once Pacific coast canneries began shipping east in bulk through the 1870s and 1880s, tinned salmon became one of the cheapest sources of good protein in a kitchen far from the coast — which is why a contributor could call for salmon without a word about where to get it. The dressing is of its period: a sieved hard-boiled yolk, mustard, vinegar and a spoonful of cream served as a household stand-in for a made mayonnaise, requiring no whisking of raw oil. The attribution to a named contributor, Miss Annie Gardner, suggests a community collection in which recipes were gathered from neighbours and printed largely as they were handed in.