Fish Salad
Separate into small pieces or flakes 1/2 pound of cold fish, slice an equal quantity of cold cooked potato, chop 2 gherkins fine; mix well and season with chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Place in a dish and cover with mayonnaise dressing.
A leftovers salad of the plainest kind, and it stands or falls on the quality of the fish and the temperature it was kept at. Nothing here needs conversion, but a few things need judgement.
- The hinge: cold fish, properly coldThis is built from cooked fish that has been chilled, not left standing on the side. Refrigerate the cooked fish promptly and use it within two days; dressed salads of this sort should not sit at room temperature for more than an hour or so.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish flakes well — cod, haddock, pollock, hake. Salmon works and gives more colour. Avoid delicate flat fish, which collapse into paste when mixed.
- PotatoWaxy potatoes hold their slices; floury ones break down into the dressing. Cook, cool completely, then slice — slicing hot potato gives you crumbs.
- GherkinsTwo gherkins comes to roughly a tablespoon or so chopped, depending on their size. A gherkin here means a small sour pickled cucumber rather than a sweet one; sweet pickle changes the balance considerably.
- MayonnaiseThe dressing is presumably a homemade mayonnaise made with raw yolk. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is the sensible choice here, since nothing in this dish is cooked after mixing.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a pound of fish plus the same weight of potato serves two as a light main or four as a side. Season after mixing and taste — cooked fish and pickles both carry salt already.
- ServingThe original simply covers the salad with dressing rather than tossing it. Doing so keeps the flakes intact; fold it through at the table if you prefer it evenly coated.
Fish salad belongs to the frugal end of household cookery, where cold cooked fish and yesterday's boiled potatoes were assets rather than scraps. Cookbooks aimed at low-cost housekeeping — a whole genre by the late nineteenth century, often attributed to domestic-science reformers and the spread of cheap print — treated the salad chapter largely as a place to use up what the larder held, with mayonnaise doing the work of making it look deliberate. The pairing of fish and potato under a thick dressing has often been likened to the potato-and-herring salads of northern Europe, and the addition of chopped gherkin and parsley suggests what is generally taken to be a late-Victorian habit of lifting a bland cold mixture without cost. Recipes like this may also point to a period when mayonnaise was, by tradition, something an ordinary cook made by hand, whisked in a bowl, rather than a jarred product.