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Salmon and Lobster Salad
If the salmon salad is made of the fish preserved in cans, drain it from the oil and mince the meat fine. Cut up one third as much lettuce or celery. For one box of salmon, boil four eggs hard; lay them in cold water a few minutes, shell and separate the whites from the yolks; lay the whites aside. Mash the yolks smooth with two tablespoonfuls sweet olive oil or one teacup sweet rich milk or Cream. The oil makes the smoothest and best paste. Dissolve in one teacup vinegar, 1 tablespoonful sugar. 1 teaspoonful salt. 2 or more teaspoonfuls fine mustard. Pepper to the taste.
Mix this with the paste and toss lightly over the meat with a silver fork. Ornament the dish in which it is served with the green leaves of the celery, or with curled parsley and the whites of eggs cut in rings. Lobster salad is prepared in the same way. Take the nicest parts of the lobster.--Mrs. C. C.
A cold salad bound with a yolk-and-oil paste rather than mayonnaise, and one of the earliest sorts of recipe to assume a tin in the pantry. The measurements are the only real obstacle.
- The hinge: mash the yolks bone dry firstThe paste only comes smooth if the hard yolks are pressed through a sieve or worked flat before any liquid goes in. Add the oil a little at a time, as for mayonnaise, or the dressing stays grainy.
- A teacup is not a cupA teacup was generally reckoned smaller than a modern cup, commonly somewhere around 6 fl oz, though the book gives no definition. That applies to both the vinegar and the milk-or-cream option.
- "One box of salmon"A standard nineteenth-century tin of Columbia River salmon was about a pound. Two 6-7 oz modern cans come to roughly the same weight of drained fish.
- Canned salmon has changedToday's cans are packed in water or their own juices rather than oil, so there is little to drain and the fish is less rich. Salt lightly and taste before adding the full teaspoonful.
- Vinegar to your own palateA teacupful of vinegar to four yolks is sharp by current taste, and household cider and wine vinegars varied in strength, unlike the standardised 5 percent product on the shelf now. Mix the dressing, taste it, and hold some back.
- "Fine mustard" means dry mustardPowdered mustard, not a prepared jar mustard. Two teaspoonfuls of English mustard powder is assertive; let the mixed dressing sit ten minutes before judging it, as the heat blooms.
- The silver fork is not affectationVinegar attacks iron and older tinned steel, and the resulting metallic taste is real. Any stainless or wooden implement does the job now.
- LobsterUse cooked lobster meat, tail and claw. The recipe says to prepare it 'in the same way', which means mincing, but bite-sized pieces hold up better.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a first course or light lunch. Dress it no more than an hour ahead and keep it cold, since the fish and the egg dressing both suffer at room temperature.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia appeared in 1879, at the moment canned salmon stopped being a novelty: the Pacific canneries on the Columbia and Sacramento rivers had scaled up through the 1860s and 70s, and cheap tins of red fish reached inland Southern pantries where fresh salmon never had. That is why the recipe pauses to consider the case of fish "preserved in cans" at all, offering it as an alternative to the fresh fish it otherwise assumes. The dressing belongs to an older American family than mayonnaise proper — a hard-yolk paste thinned with oil or cream and sharpened with sweetened vinegar and dry mustard, the same idea as the boiled dressings that dominated home cookbooks until bottled mayonnaise arrived in the twentieth century. Lobster salad, appended here as an equivalent, was the more fashionable and far more expensive version; pairing the two in one entry quietly tells you that the tin was standing in for the luxury.