Lee Harrison
LILLSALLAD
(Salt Herring Salad) Remove the skin and bone from a half dozen salt herring. Cut up in small squares and add to it an equal amount of cooked meat of any kind; chicken, veal or even beef will do. Cut the meat in dice also.
Have ready cold vegetables, potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, beets and beans. Cut into small squares also. Now dice the raw vegetables, which include celery, cucumbers and apples.
Use the stronger flavored vegetables with a regard to individual taste. For instance, more potatoes are used than turnips. Mix the whole carefully until all the colors are evenly distributed and put into a large mould that has been first wet with cold water. Chill thoroughly in ice box, turn out on platter and pour pure cream over it. The cream may be colored by mixing a little beet juice with it.
Decorate with parsley and chopped hard-boiled egg.
This is one of the dishes we like best in Sweden. Nearly every household has it for a week-end dish.
A Swedish sillsalad built from leftovers and bound only by its mould and a pour of cream. The success of the dish rests almost entirely on getting the salt out of the herring first.
- Soak the herringSalt herring as sold in barrels is cured hard and is inedible straight from the brine. Soak the fillets in cold water for 8 to 12 hours, changing the water two or three times, then taste a corner before it goes anywhere near the bowl. Modern jarred herring in brine or wine sauce is already mild and needs only rinsing and draining.
- That first line"BELGIAN HARE-SOUR CREAM SAUCE" appears to be a stray catchline or heading from a neighbouring recipe that has run into this one. It has nothing to do with the herring salad.
- "A half dozen salt herring"Six whole salt herring, skinned and boned, gives roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of fillet — a large quantity. Scale to two or three fish for a normal household and keep the meat and vegetables in proportion.
- Cooked vs. raw vegetablesThe potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, beets and beans are boiled ahead and cooled; the celery, cucumber and apple go in raw for crunch. Cook the beets separately or the whole salad turns pink before you want it to.
- The mouldAny bowl or loaf tin will do. Wetting it with cold water is the period trick for turning out an unmoulded salad cleanly — a thin film of water keeps the mixture from gripping. Pack it firmly and chill at least 3 to 4 hours so it holds its shape.
- "Pure cream"Unsweetened, unwhipped heavy cream, poured over at the table. If you want it thicker and tangier in the modern manner, lightly whipped cream soured with a spoonful of vinegar, or a little sour cream, is closer to many modern Swedish versions.
- Beet juiceA teaspoon of the liquid from cooked beets tints the cream pale rose. Add it shortly before serving so the colour stays even.
- YieldAs written this feeds 10 to 12 as part of a cold table. It is a smörgåsbord dish rather than a plated course — serve it in slices with rye bread, and keep it refrigerated, as salted fish in cream does not sit well at room temperature.
Sillsalad — the book's "lillsallad" looks like a garbled transcription — is the herring-and-root-vegetable salad that anchors the Swedish cold table, and it belongs to a family of beet-pink composed salads found all round the Baltic, including Finnish rosolli and the Russian salads that are generally traced to the same nineteenth-century fashion for moulded mayonnaise and cream dressings. Its logic is thrift: barrel-salted herring was among the cheapest preserved proteins in Scandinavia for centuries, and the recipe frankly invites whatever cooked meat and boiled vegetables the week has left over. The note that "nearly every household has it for a week-end dish" places it as everyday food rather than festival food, though a version of the same salad in a fancier mould with a rosier cream is also a familiar Christmas dish. The contributor here is plainly offering the dish of home to an American readership.