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Salmon Salad
Place on a bed of lettuce leaves, in a flat salad bowl, the contents of half a can of salmon, freed from oil and bones, and flaked. Pour over the fish a little boiled salad dressing or mayonnaise, and garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs and lemon.
A three-line assembly recipe that assumes a pantry can of salmon and a jar of homemade dressing already on hand. The only real work is in the handling of the fish.
- The canThe 1 lb 'tall' can was a common trade size in this period, though smaller flat tins were also sold; half of a 1 lb can is about 8 oz, which is close to a small modern can. Two smaller cans or pouches totalling roughly 8 oz will also do.
- "Freed from oil and bones"Older canned salmon was packed in its own oil and juices and included the vertebral bones and skin. Drain well and blot on paper towels. The recipe directs you to remove the soft bones; they are in fact edible if you would rather mash them into the flakes, but that is a departure from the text.
- Flake, do not shredBreak the fish along its natural layers with a fork and stop. Overworked salmon turns to paste once dressing hits it, which is the one thing that ruins this dish.
- Boiled salad dressingNot a mayonnaise substitute in name only: it is a cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, mustard, sugar and a little flour or butter, generally sharper than mayonnaise. Any modern cooked or "boiled" dressing recipe stands in.
- Dress lightly, at the tableThe instruction to pour over "a little" is deliberate. Salmon this rich needs perhaps 2 to 3 tablespoons of dressing for 8 oz; more and the acid mutes the fish.
- TemperatureChill the salmon and the eggs, and keep the lettuce cold and dry. A salad of oil-rich fish assembled at room temperature soon reads greasy.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; half a can will serve about two as a lunch course, or four as a first course. Scale up by whole cans rather than halves.
Canned salmon was one of the first industrially preserved foods to become genuinely cheap in North America: commercial canning on the Columbia River from the late 1860s and in British Columbia from the 1870s expanded through the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and a tin of Pacific salmon became a staple in inland households that had never seen the fish fresh. That accounts for the recipe's brevity and its confident "half a can." Boiled dressing is named here first, with mayonnaise offered as the alternative; cooked dressings were widely used in household cookery of the period, though how they compared in popularity with mayonnaise is not documented. The garnish of hard-boiled egg and lemon slices was a common treatment for cold fish of the period and is still seen on salmon plates today.