Home › Salads and Dressings › Swedish Salad
Swedish Salad
Wash, trim and soak in cold water for one hour a good. sized mackerel, then cover it with boiling water, and simmer twenty minutes. Drain and cut into dice. Cut into small blocks sufficient cold roast beef to make a pint. Cut two boiled potatoes into dice. Mix one tablespoonful of capers, one tablespoonful of chopped gherkins, the same of chopped onion, the same of chopped parsley, ten goodsized olives, stoned, and two hard-boiled eggs, chopped fine; add to this the beef, potato and mackerel. carefully, and pour over it a half-pint of French salad dressing; season highly with salt and cayenne. Put the whole in a salad bowl, and lay over the top two dozen cold raw oysters.
Mix
A composed leftovers salad in the Northern European mould, built on salt mackerel and cold roast beef. The text is garbled at the end — the stray "Mix" belongs before "carefully, and pour over it a half-pint of French salad dressing."
- The mackerel is salted, not freshThe mackerel may be salted rather than fresh -- the soak in cold water before a plain simmer points that way, though the recipe does not say so, and an hour is short for properly desalting salt fish. If you use fresh mackerel, skip the soak, poach it 8-10 minutes rather than twenty, and salt the finished salad to taste; if you use salt mackerel, soak it longer than an hour -- several hours or overnight, with a change of water -- and taste before adding any further salt.
- Twenty minutes is too longSimmering mackerel that hard shreds it and drives out the oil that makes the fish worth eating. Bring the water to a bare shiver, slip the fish in off the heat, and give it ten minutes at most for a whole side; it should just flake.
- A pint of beefMeasured by volume, as this recipe does. A pint of small dice is roughly 10-14 oz, or the meat off a decent slice of cold roast.
- French salad dressingIn American books of this period this is a plain vinaigrette: three or four parts oil to one of vinegar, salt, pepper, whisked or shaken. Half a pint is a cup, which is generous for this quantity; start with half and add more once everything is combined.
- Gherkins and capersGherkins here are the sour, vinegar-packed cucumbers, not sweet pickles; sweet ones will throw the balance. Rinse and drain the capers if they are salt-packed.
- Season highly with cayenneTake this at its word only after the dressing has gone on and the salt mackerel has had its say. Cayenne, salt and vinegar are all pulling in the same direction, and salt fish carries more than you expect.
- The raw oysters on topThey are a garnish laid on at the last moment, not stirred through — drain them well or they will water the dressing. Raw shellfish should be from a reputable source and kept cold until serving, and is not for pregnant women, young children, or anyone immunocompromised. If that rules them out, poached and chilled oysters do the same visual work.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; on these quantities it should serve about six as a first course or four as a summer lunch. Dress and chill it for half an hour before the oysters go on; it wants to be cold, not iced.
Salads of this kind — cold cooked fish, cold meat, potato, pickles and hard-boiled egg bound in a sharp dressing — are relatives of the older dish that Scandinavian and German cookbooks call a herring salad or Heringssalat, and American books cheerfully labelled anything in that line "Swedish" or "Russian" regardless of provenance. The logic is a household one: it is a dish assembled entirely from things already cooked and already in the larder, with the salt fish supplying the seasoning that meat scraps and boiled potato lack. Salt mackerel was among the cheapest preserved proteins in the American Northeast, sold by the barrel and soaked back to edibility as a matter of routine, which may be what lies behind the recipe's opening hour in cold water, offered with no explanation. The raw oysters banked over the top are the period's instinct for garnish as display, and a reminder of how ordinary and inexpensive oysters still were in late-nineteenth-century American cities.