Sardine Salad
Remove bones from one dozen sardines; mix four hardcooked eggs finely chopped, twelve pimolas finely chopped, and three pickles finely chopped. Marinate with a French dressing. Serve sardines on lettuce and dot over them spoonfuls of the egg mixture.
Salmon Salad No. I Prepare the same as Lobster Salad No. 1.
Salmon Salad No. 2 Prepare and serve the same as Lobster Salad No. 2.
Salmon Salad No. 3 Mix two cups cold cooked salmon with enough mayonnaise dressing to make it creamy. Pack in timbale molds, chill; remove from molds. Serve on lettuce, and garnish with marinated slices of cucumber and mayonnaise dressing.
A composed salad of the plate-assembly type common in American cookbooks around 1900, plus three cross-referenced salmon variations. Nothing here is cooked, so the quality of the tinned fish and the dressing carries the dish.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento, sold widely in jars. Use pimiento-stuffed Spanish olives; twelve of them chopped comes to roughly a quarter of a cup.
- French dressingIn cookbooks of this period the name usually means a simple vinaigrette shaken from oil and vinegar, commonly about three-to-one, with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today. Two or three tablespoons is enough to moisten the egg mixture without flooding it.
- PicklesCucumber pickles, and in this context almost certainly sour or dill rather than sweet. Chop fine and blot them dry, or the mixture will weep on the lettuce.
- Boning the sardinesSardines canned today have soft, entirely edible backbones; splitting and lifting the spine out is cosmetic, done so the fillets lie flat and whole. Drain them on paper first so the packing oil does not slick the leaves.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided dariole molds of about half a cup. Ramekins, teacups or muffin cups work; line them with plastic film to unmold cleanly, and chill at least an hour so the packed mixture holds its shape.
- The cross-referencesSalmon Salads 1 and 2 point to the Lobster Salad recipes elsewhere in the salad chapter, which are not reproduced on this page. Salad No. 3 is self-contained and needs about a 14-ounce tin of salmon, skin and large bones removed.
- YieldA dozen sardines makes about four servings of three fish each, with the egg mixture dotted over. Assemble within an hour of serving; hard-cooked egg dressed with vinaigrette turns watery if it stands.
Sardine salad belongs to the era when the tin can turned preserved fish into an everyday luxury for inland American households. The Walter M. Lowney Co., a Boston chocolate maker, published its cook book as a promotional volume, and it devoted a full chapter to salads built on canned salmon, lobster and sardines, dressed with mayonnaise or boiled dressing and served on a leaf of lettuce. The habit of cross-referencing one salad to another, as the salmon entries do here, reflects how standardized the form had become: a cold protein, a bound dressing, a mold or a leaf, and a garnish. Pimolas, the stuffed olives called for, were a branded novelty of the period that has since lost its trade name while the product itself became a supermarket staple.