Salmon Salad
When using canned salmon be very careful not to break the fish when taking from the can, as it crumbles easily. Carefully separate it into pieces with a silver fork. Add an equal amount of diced celery, and use the cream salad dressing. Serve on lettuce.
A three-line assembly recipe that assumes you know what the book's cream salad dressing is and how canned salmon of the period arrived. A few notes make it usable.
- The hinge: handle it cold and barely at allChill the unopened can before you open it. Cold salmon holds together; warm salmon falls to mush the moment a fork touches it, which is exactly what the first sentence is warning against.
- The silver forkSilver was specified because ordinary steel cutlery of the era pitted and left a metallic taste in acidic or oily foods. Modern stainless steel is inert, so any fork will do — the point that survives is fork, not spoon, and a light hand.
- Canned salmon then and nowPeriod canned salmon came packed with skin and vertebrae in. Traditional pack still does; the soft bones are edible and worth mashing in for calcium, or lift them out along with the darker skin if the look bothers you. Two 6 oz cans of drained sockeye or pink give roughly 1½ cups of fish.
- Cream salad dressingThe cross-referenced dressing is a period salad dressing, not whipped cream and not modern jarred mayonnaise; period versions of the name are usually cooked dressings thickened with egg, so check the book's own recipe before substituting. If you use mayonnaise instead, slacken it with a spoonful of cream and a splash of vinegar or lemon to get a comparable tang.
- Equal amount of celeryRead it as equal by volume — about 1½ cups of small dice against 1½ cups of fish. Use the pale inner ribs; the outer ones are stringy and will need peeling.
- Dressing quantityStart with about ½ cup of dressing for that volume of salad and add more only if it looks dry. Overdressed salmon salad slumps on the lettuce.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as a lunch plate. Whole leaves of a soft or crisp lettuce make the cup the recipe implies; keep the salad in a mound rather than spreading it, and dress it no more than an hour ahead.
Rufus Estes, who published Good Things to Eat in 1911, spent much of his career cooking in Pullman dining cars and later for the subsidiary companies of U.S. Steel, and the book carries the marks of both: dishes that can be built quickly from shelf-stable stores and served neatly. Canned salmon was one of the great American pantry staples of the period — the Columbia River and Alaska canneries had been shipping it in volume since the 1870s, and it put ocean fish on tables a thousand miles inland at a price working households could meet. Salmon salad, chicken salad and lobster salad are often said to have been the standard trio of the era's cold luncheon table, all built on the same formula of protein, celery for crunch, and a cooked cream dressing; celery in particular was regarded as a semi-luxury vegetable and appeared in salads far more often than its flavor alone would justify.<br><br>The instruction to use a silver fork is a small period fingerprint. It appears throughout nineteenth-century cookery writing wherever fish, fruit or vinegar is involved, and reflects a real problem with the carbon-steel cutlery most kitchens used rather than any nicety of table manners.</br></br>