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Tuna or Salmon Sandwiches
1 small can fish. 3 sweet pickles 6 stuffed olives Mrs. Geo. Smith. 1/2 C walnut meats Rye or white bread Put all ingredients through food chopper; mix with salad dressing and spread on thin slices of bread.
McDonald's Commercial School Special Courses in
A church-supper sandwich filling of the grinder era, dense with pickle, olive and nut. The text runs together with a contributor line and a printer's advertisement, which is normal for these locally printed books.
- "1 small can fish"In the period this probably means a can of roughly 6 to 8 oz of tuna or salmon, somewhat larger than the 5 oz can standard today. Drain it well, and with salmon pick out the skin unless you want it; the soft vertebrae can be crushed in and are a source of calcium.
- The food chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table, which cut rather than pureed. A food processor pulsed six or eight times gets close; run it continuously and you will have paste. Chopping the pickles, olives and walnuts by hand and stirring them into flaked fish gives the best texture.
- "Salad dressing"In community books of this kind this usually means a cooked or boiled dressing, tart and slightly sweet, or a commercial dressing of that type rather than true mayonnaise. Either works; the filling wants enough to bind, roughly 1/4 cup.
- Sweet pickles and stuffed olivesThe recipe does not say what size pickle is meant; if they are small whole sweet pickles, three would give something like 1/3 cup chopped. Stuffed olives are green olives with pimiento. Both are salty and sweet enough that the filling needs no added salt until tasted.
- WalnutsHalf a cup of walnut meats is a large proportion for one can of fish and is what makes this filling distinctive. Toasting them briefly improves flavour, though the original does not.
- Bread and assemblyThin slices are specified, though the recipe does not say why. Trimmed white or rye, spread with softened butter first, keeps the bread from going damp if the sandwiches are made an hour ahead.
- YieldEnough for about 8 sandwiches cut in halves, or roughly 20 to 24 small tea-sandwich triangles.
- Stray text"Mrs. Geo. Smith" is the contributor's credit and "McDonald's Commercial School" is a local advertisement printed alongside the recipe; neither belongs to the ingredient list.
Community cookbooks sold to fund a church or a building project were compiled from members' own cards, and the sandwich sections of the 1910s through 1930s are among the best records of what canned food did to American home cooking. Commercially canned salmon had been shipping out of the Pacific Northwest since the 1860s and was cheap; canned tuna was a later arrival, generally traced to Southern California in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the two were treated as interchangeable in recipes like this one. Grinding the whole mixture through a food chopper is often said to have been common practice for sandwich fillings of the period, when ladies' luncheons, card parties and church socials seem to have favored something that could be spread thin and made in quantity. The advertisement running into the text is part of the economics of the book: local businesses bought the space that paid for the printing.