Sardine Salad
1 small box sardines Juice of 1/2 lemon 3 hard-boiled eggs Mayonnaise dressing Prepare the sardines, free from oil, bones and skin; season with lemon juice; cut into small pieces and mix with the eggs, finely chopped. Arrange on a bed of lettuce leaves and serve with Mayonnaise dressing.
A straightforward tinned-fish salad that needs almost no translation, though a few of its assumptions have changed.
- "1 small box sardines"Tinned sardines were sold in flat rectangular "boxes" of roughly 3 to 4 oz, close to what a standard tin still holds today. The recipe gives no yield; one tin with three eggs would plausibly stretch to two.
- Boning and skinningThe instruction to bone and skin suggests fish rather larger than today's brisling. Modern brisling and small Norwegian sardines generally have soft, edible bones and skin, so the deboning step is often optional — split each fish along the spine and lift the backbone only if you want a finer texture.
- Free from oilDrain the tin thoroughly and blot the fillets on paper. Oil left clinging will break the mayonnaise into a slick on the plate. If the tin is packed in olive oil rather than soy or cottonseed, a spoonful is worth saving for the lemon dressing.
- The hinge: dress the fish firstThe lemon juice goes on the sardines alone, before anything else joins them, and it is doing the real seasoning work — cutting the oil and the tinned edge. Give it five minutes to sit before folding in the eggs.
- EggsThree hard-boiled eggs to one small tin is a high proportion; the eggs are the bulk here and the fish is the flavour. Chop them fine, as instructed, or the salad falls apart into separate components.
- MayonnaiseThe book assumes a made-from-scratch mayonnaise, thicker and sharper than jarred. If using commercial mayonnaise, thin it with a little more lemon juice so it coats rather than clots.
- Yield and servingTwo generous or four small portions. It is a cold plate salad, not a spread — serve it promptly, as the dressed egg weeps if it stands, and keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes out.
Sardine salads turn up constantly in American cookbooks between the 1890s and the 1930s, and the reason is the tin. Canned sardines were among the cheap, shelf-stable proteins available to an ordinary household — alongside older standbys like salt cod, salt pork and dried pulses — imported in quantity from France and Norway and later packed on the coast of Maine, and cookbooks of the period treat a "box of sardines" as a pantry staple in the way we might treat canned tuna. Loose-leaf cookbooks like Mrs. Fryer's were sold to homemakers as expandable working manuals, and their salad chapters lean heavily on this kind of assembly dish: something cold, quick, requiring no oven, and built from things already in the cupboard. The pairing with chopped hard-boiled egg and a bed of lettuce follows the standard salad formula of the era, in which lettuce was more often a plate liner than the substance of the dish.