Fish Salad
Cold boiled or baked fish may be made into salad, allowing one head of lettuce and a half pint of mayonnaise to every pint of the picked fish.
A formula rather than a method: the book assumes you know how to flake cooked fish and dress it. The proportions are the useful part.
- The measuresA pint of picked fish is roughly 12 to 14 oz of flaked cooked flesh; how much whole fish that takes depends entirely on whether you start with fillets or a whole fish with head and frame. A half pint of mayonnaise is one cup, which by modern taste is generous; less will coat the fish without burying it.
- YieldOne head of lettuce and a pint of fish serves three or four as a light lunch course. Scale in whole units — the ratio is what the recipe is really giving you.
- Which fishFirm-fleshed cold fish holds its shape: halibut, cod, haddock, salmon. Delicate flatfish collapses into paste under a cup of mayonnaise. Salt cod and smoked fish need soaking or thinning of the dressing, as the original assumes plain boiled or baked fish.
- Pick it properlyThe hinge of the dish. Every fragment of skin, dark bloodline and pin bone must come out before dressing, because you cannot find them afterward. Flake with your fingers, in large pieces rather than shreds.
- Mayonnaise in 1900Period mayonnaise -- Mayonnaise here would have been made at home with raw yolk, and household versions varied in consistency and acidity from the standardised jarred product. If using commercial mayonnaise, loosen it with lemon juice and a little cold water so it drapes rather than clings.
- Cold means coldThis is a made-over dish for hot weather, built on leftovers. Cooked fish and mayonnaise should be kept refrigerated and dressed shortly before serving; do not let the assembled salad stand at room temperature through a long meal.
- The lettuceA "head of lettuce" of this period would most likely have been a soft butterhead type rather than a modern crisphead. Whole leaves make a good bed for the dressed fish.
Fish salad belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of "made dishes" — thrifty second appearances for meat or fish already cooked once, a familiar category in household manuals of the period. Its place in a book of hot weather dishes fits the logic of summer cookery, which aimed to use the range as little as possible, so the boiled halibut of one day could become the salad of the next, and mayonnaise, whipped up cold in a bowl, needed no heat as hot butter sauces did. The reliance on a proportion rather than a procedure is common in the period's cookery writing.