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Fish Left-Overs: Salad
Bluefish Salad. 3 cupfuls cold flaked bluefish, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful white pepper, cupful olive oil, 1 tablespoonful vinegar.
Flake the bluefish neatly and marinate for an hour with a French dressing made from the oil, vinegar, and seasonings. Arrange on a nest of lettuce, and serve with mayonnaise garnished with chopped olives. Clam Salad. 2 cupfuls cold clams, 1 cupful shredded lettuce.
Use for this salad cold steamed clams or left-overs from a Rhode Island bake. Take off the black heads and remove the skins. Serve in a nest of shredded lettuce. Marinate for ten minutes with French dressing, then serve.
Halibut Salad. 2 cupfuls cold halibut, 1 cupful shredded lettuce, cupful cold boiled potatoes.
Flake halibut into small pieces.
Shred the lettuce with scissors. Cut the potato into half-inch cubes. Mix fish and potato lightly. Lay in a nest of lettuce, and pour over it French dressing.
Salmon Salad Molds. 1 cupful cold salmon, tablespoonful lemon juice, ½ teaspoonful parsley, 2 drops Sauce, McIlhenny's Tabasco 1 tablespoonful gelatin.
Mix the salmon, lemon, parsley, tabasco, and gelatin, dissolved in a little water, with enough salad dressing to moisten. Wet dozen Dario molds. Fill with salmon, level the top of each one, place on ice, and turn out on lettuce leaves. Serve with a mayonnaise.
Spiced Fish.
Cold salmon, halibut, or shad makes tasty dishes when flaked and MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK covered with hot spiced vinegar and left a day before serving. Cold fried fish is excellent served very cold.
Spanish mackerel is nice in this way.
Any kind of catsup or salad dressing may be served with it, but it is quite palatable with bread and butter, and makes a change from cold meat.
A cluster of five ways to use up cooked fish, written when a cook expected to find yesterday's boiled halibut or clambake clams waiting in the ice chest. The measurements have suffered in transcription, so read the ratios rather than the words.
- The missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in printing: "cupful olive oil, 1 tablespoonful vinegar" is not a workable dressing, and "cupful cold boiled potatoes" against 2 cupfuls of halibut reads oddly. Treat French dressing as three parts oil to one part vinegar and scale to the amount of fish you actually have.
- A teaspoonful of white pepperThat is a great deal of pepper for three cups of fish by modern palates. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- Dario moldsA misprint for dariole molds imble cups of roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces. Any small ramekin, muffin cup or espresso cup will serve. "Wet" them means rinse with cold water so the set salmon releases cleanly.
- The gelatinOne tablespoon of powdered gelatin is a little more than one envelope, enough to set roughly two cups of liquid, so a single cupful of salmon plus dressing gives a very firm mold. Soften it in a few spoonfuls of cold water for five minutes, then dissolve over gentle heat before mixing — dropped in dry it will stay grainy.
- Clam heads and skinsRemoving "the black heads" means pulling off the dark siphon tip and the tough membrane sheathing the neck. Skip it and the salad is chewy in the wrong places.
- A Rhode Island bakeA clambake: clams, corn and potatoes steamed over hot stones under seaweed. The instruction simply means leftover steamed clams are ideal here.
- McIlhenny's TabascoThe same product still sold under that name. Two drops in a cupful of salmon is a background warmth, not heat.
- Spiced fish and the keepingCooked fish covered with hot spiced vinegar and left a day is a light escabeche, and the acid does most of the preserving work. Keep it refrigerated for that day rather than in a cool larder, and use cooked fish within three or four days of its first cooking in any of these salads.
- YieldThe recipes give no servings. The salmon mold recipe calls for a dozen molds, though a single cupful of salmon will more realistically fill about six of the size described.
Fish salads like these belong to an American cookery of thrift, one that assumed a household that boiled a whole fish for dinner and had to answer for the remains the next day. The fish named are the everyday catch of the Atlantic seaboard — bluefish, shad, Spanish mackerel, halibut — and shad in particular was so abundant in the Hudson and Delaware that it was considered cheap food, a status it has long since lost. The specific naming of McIlhenny's Tabasco is worth noticing, and its appearance in a chilled gelatin mold shows how readily the aspic — the great show-off dish of the Victorian and Edwardian table — absorbed whatever came to hand.