Home › Sandwiches and Canapes › Salmon Sandwiches
Salmon Sandwiches
Drain the oil from a can of salmon, remove the skin and bones and mash the fish very fine. Add to it the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs pressed through the potato ricer, half a teaspoon of salt, one-fourth teaspoon of paprika, two tablespoons of lemon juice, two tablespoons of chopped parsley and half a cup of boiled salad dressing. Spread between folds of white or entire wheat bread.
A cooked-dressing salmon spread from the era when canned salmon was a pantry staple in every household. The proportions still work, with a few translations.
- "Boiled salad dressing"Not mayonnaise but a cooked dressing: egg yolks, vinegar, mustard, a little flour or cornstarch and milk, thickened over heat and cooled. Many period cookbooks give it in the salad chapter. Store-bought cooked-style dressing works, or use mayonnaise thinned with a teaspoon of vinegar and a pinch of dry mustard, which is richer and less sharp than the original intent.
- "Entire wheat bread"Period name for whole wheat, then usually a finer, lighter loaf than modern stone-ground whole wheat. Any soft sandwich loaf suits; a coarse artisan crumb will fight the filling.
- Size of the canThe standard tall can of the period held about a pound. Modern cans run 14.75 oz, close enough, or use two 6 oz cans and expect a slightly looser filling against the same amount of yolk and dressing.
- Skin and bonesThe instruction to remove them is aesthetic. The vertebrae in canned salmon are soft and are the reason the stuff is a calcium source; mash them in if you prefer, and the texture will not suffer.
- Six yolks is a lotThat much yolk makes a dense, pâté-like paste rather than a moist salad. Four yolks gives a spread that stays pliable, and the leftover whites can be chopped into it.
- The ricerA potato ricer or a coarse sieve gives hard yolks an even, fluffy grain that a fork cannot match. Push them through while still slightly warm if you can.
- Rest before spreadingGive the mixture fifteen minutes in the refrigerator. The lemon juice and salt need time to reach the fish, and a chilled filling spreads without tearing soft bread.
- YieldRoughly three cups of filling, enough for about twelve full sandwiches or forty small tea sandwiches with the crusts cut away.
- KeepingAn egg-and-dressing filling with no acid preservative beyond lemon juice. Keep it cold and use within two days; do not let assembled sandwiches sit out on a buffet for hours.
Canned salmon transformed American home cooking between the 1870s and the First World War: Columbia River and later Alaskan canneries put a cheap, shelf-stable, high-protein fish into inland kitchens that had never seen fresh salmon, and cookbooks answered with loaves, croquettes, salads and fillings like this one. The boiled dressing is the period's fingerprint. Commercial mayonnaise was only gradually becoming a general grocery item in these years, so the standard binder was a cooked, flour-thickened, vinegar-sharp dressing made at home, tangier and less oily than what most cooks would reach for now.