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Tuna Fish Cocktail
1/4 cup tomato catsup 1/2 cup lemon juice 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 1 tablespoon grated horseradish 1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons onion, chopped 4 tablespoons celery, cut fine 4 tablespoons green pepper, cut fine 2 cups tuna fish, (flaked) Mix above ingredients, except tuna fish. Chill, add tuna fish. Rechill ten minutes before serving. Serves 10.
A seafood cocktail in the 1930s sense: chilled fish dressed in a sharp tomato sauce and spooned into glasses, not a drink. The dressing here is far more acidic than a modern cocktail sauce, which is the one thing to taste and adjust before the tuna goes in.
- The lemon dominatesHalf a cup of lemon juice against a quarter cup of catsup is roughly the reverse of today's proportions, and prolonged sitting in that much acid can soften and wash out the flaked fish. Mix the sauce, taste it, and hold back some of the juice if you want the fish to stay firm and mild.
- Tabasco quantityA full teaspoon of Tabasco in about a cup of dressing is assertive by any standard. Add half, taste, then decide.
- Grated horseradishThe original means fresh root, grated, which is hotter and drier than the jarred kind. Bottled prepared horseradish packed in vinegar works, but drain it or the mixture gets thinner and sharper still.
- Catsup then and nowCommercial catsup of the period was probably less sweet than modern ketchup, so a modern bottle may push the dressing sweeter than intended; compensate with a little more lemon or salt if it reads sweet.
- The tunaTwo cups flaked is roughly three 5 oz cans. Oil-packed gives a richer body that stands up to the acid; water-packed will taste leaner and absorb more of the dressing.
- Chill in two stagesThe recipe chills the sauce first, then adds the fish and rechills only ten minutes, which has the effect of keeping the tuna out of the acid until close to serving. Follow it, and dress the fish as late as you can manage.
- ServingTen portions from this quantity works out to roughly a third of a cup each, so small servings in a stemmed glass; period presentations of such cocktails often set the glass on crushed ice with a lettuce leaf beneath and a lemon wedge on the rim.
Seafood cocktails came into American entertaining through the oyster and shrimp cocktails of hotel dining rooms in the late nineteenth century, where the point was a cold, spiced, acidic mouthful to open a meal. By the 1920s and 1930s canned tuna, cheap and shelf-stable, was being pushed into every position that fresh fish had held, and a tuna cocktail let a hostess serve something that looked like a restaurant course out of a pantry. The elaborate cut vegetables here, onion, celery and green pepper all chopped fine, are typical of the period's appetizer style, where texture and a cold glass did much of the work.