Nantese Salad
Peel 3 medium sized Spanish onions, scoop out 1 teaspoonful of the center of each and put in the hollow a bit of butter sufficient to half fill it.
Add a slight seasoning of pepper and salt, place in a baking pan and bake in a moderate oven until they are brown. When cold cut into quarters and place on a bed of watercress.
Skin and bone 6 sardines, cut into halves and lay on the pieces of onion. Pour over some mayonnaise, to 1 cupful of which one teaspoonful of curry powder has been added.
Marguerite or Daisy Salad Take just as many hard-boiled eggs as there are persons to be served. Remove the yolks and mash them fine with a perforated spoon, add salt, pepper, mustard and a little melted butter, mix thoroughly. Lay a lettuce leaf on a salad plate and arrange the yolk on it for the center of the "Marguerite." Cut the whites into strips and lay around the edge for the petals of the daisy. Pour over it a mayonnaise dressing.
Two salads run together on one page: a baked-onion and sardine composition, and an egg salad arranged to look like a daisy. Both are assembly jobs, and the only real cooking is the onions.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as somewhere around 350F. Whole peeled Spanish onions of medium size will likely need an hour or more at that heat before they colour and turn tender; test with a skewer rather than going by the browning alone.
- Spanish onionsThe large, pale, mild variety sold today under that name is the right thing. A sweet onion works as well; a small yellow cooking onion will be sharper.
- The hollowScooping a teaspoon from the centre makes a well for butter, which bastes the onion from inside as it bakes. Leave enough wall that the onion holds its shape, and set them in a snug pan so they cannot tip.
- Cool them fullyThe instruction to use them cold is not fussiness. A warm onion will thin the mayonnaise into a slick and wilt the watercress under it.
- SardinesTinned sardines in oil, drained. The recipe expects fish large enough to skin and bone; smaller modern tins are often soft enough that the backbone can be left in. Six fish halved gives twelve pieces, matching the twelve onion quarters, so the same three portions.
- Curry mayonnaiseA teaspoon of curry powder per cup of mayonnaise is mild. Toasting the powder briefly in a dry pan, or letting the dressing stand half an hour, takes the raw dustiness off it.
- YieldThe first salad makes three servings, one onion each. The second is scaled by the cook: one egg per person.
- Homemade mayonnaiseIf you make the dressing from scratch rather than using a jar, it contains uncooked egg. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the salad cold until it goes to the table.
- Daisy assemblyPress the seasoned yolk mixture into a rough mound with the back of a spoon, or pipe it, for a tidier centre. Cut the whites lengthwise into even strips so the petals radiate; a hot dry knife gives cleaner edges.
The name almost certainly points to Nantes, the French Atlantic port that was the centre of the sardine-canning trade in the nineteenth century; "Nantese" is the sort of loose adjectival coinage that cookbook compilers of the period applied freely to anything with a French association. Both salads belong to a fashion for composed, arranged salads that ran through the 1890s and 1900s, when mayonnaise had become a household staple and a salad was judged as much on its appearance on the plate as its flavour -- hence the daisy of egg white petals. Tinned sardines, onions and eggs were cheap, and the arrangement did the work that expensive ingredients would otherwise have to do.