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Beet and Fish Salad
To a cup of shredded tuna fish, add two chopped cooked beets and a cup of finely chopped cabbage; mix these ingredients with a quarter of a cup of mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce leaves, garnish with hard-boiled eggs, cut in quarters.
A composed salad of the canned-goods era, and one that needs almost no translation. The only real decisions are the state of the beets and how wet you let the dressing get.
- TunaOne cup of shredded tuna is roughly a large (6-7 oz) can drained, or two small ones. Oil-packed gives a richer result and needs less mayonnaise; water-packed should be pressed firmly in the strainer or the salad will weep.
- The beets"Cooked" here means boiled or roasted whole until tender, then peeled and chopped. Pickled or canned beets in vinegar work but shift the whole dish sweet-sour; if you use them, drain them well and cut the mayonnaise with a little of their liquid rather than adding vinegar separately.
- Fold, do not stirBeet juice stains everything it touches. Dress the tuna and cabbage first, then fold the beets in last with a few strokes so the salad stays streaked rather than uniformly pink.
- CabbageFinely chopped, not shredded long — small dice about the size of the tuna flakes. The recipe does not specify a variety, and green cabbage is the likely intention; salting it briefly and squeezing it dry keeps it from watering down the dressing.
- Dressing quantityA quarter cup of mayonnaise for three cups of solids is a light coating, not a bound salad. That is deliberate in a cold-supper book, but add a squeeze of lemon and a good pinch of salt and pepper, which the original omits entirely.
- Yield and servingServes three to four as a lunch plate. Chill 30 minutes before serving; longer than a couple of hours and the cabbage slackens and the color bleeds through completely.
- The eggsQuarter the hard-boiled eggs at the last moment and lay them around the edge, not on top — the yolks pick up beet color quickly and look muddy.
Salads like this one belong to the era when a can of tuna became a pantry staple in American homes and "cold supper" was a legitimate answer to a hot kitchen. The formula is entirely typical of the period's salad chapters: a canned protein, a cooked vegetable, something raw and crisp for texture, bound with a spoonful of mayonnaise and set on lettuce with hard-boiled egg for garnish. The beet-and-fish pairing itself has a longer northern European pedigree, where herring, beets and root vegetables in a creamy or sour dressing are a standard cold plate; this version reads as that idea rebuilt out of what was on the American grocery shelf.