Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Fish Salad
Fish Salad
2 cups shredded lettuce 1 can tuna fish or 1 1/2 lbs, any cold boiled fish 1/2 cup French dressing 1 teaspoon onion juice 1/2 cup Mayonnaise 1 cup finely cut celery 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Line dish with lettuce; place fish in center; pour over French dressing to which onion juice has been added and cover top of fish with celery; put Mayonnaise on top. Sprinkle with chopped parsley.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it only works if it is built at the last minute. Everything can be prepped ahead; the dressing goes on at the table's edge.
- Assemble lateShredded lettuce under an oil-and-vinegar dressing collapses within about ten minutes. Chill the lined dish, keep the fish, celery and dressings separate, and put it together immediately before it goes out.
- French dressingIn a book of this vintage this means a plain vinaigrette shaken to order, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Half a cup is generous for this quantity; hold some back if the fish is packed in oil.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a grated onion in a cloth. A teaspoon is what you get from a good half onion, and it carries far more heat than an equal volume of chopped onion.
- The tunaCanned tuna of the period commonly came in cans of roughly 6 to 7 oz of solid oil-packed fish. Two modern 5-oz cans of solid or chunk tuna, well drained, give a comparable quantity; leave it in large flakes rather than mashing it, since the dish depends on a distinct mound in the centre.
- Cold boiled fishA pound and a half of poached cod, halibut, haddock or salmon, cooled and broken into flakes with the skin and bones removed. Leftover fish poached the day before is a likely use; it needs the full quantity of dressing more than tuna does.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise was probably what was meant. If you make your own and are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs. Half a cup spooned over the top should sit as a ribbon, not a blanket.
- CeleryCut from the inner ribs, sliced fine across so it stays crisp; strings from the outer ribs are noticeable in a dish this plainly seasoned.
- YieldServes four as a lunch course, or six as a first course. Doubling works, but build it on a platter rather than in a deep bowl so the layers stay visible.
Fish salads of this kind were a standing feature of American lunch and supper tables from the 1890s onward, and canned tuna is what makes this particular version look modern for its date: commercial packing of albacore on the California coast began in the first decade of the twentieth century, and by the 1920s the can had become an ordinary pantry item rather than a novelty. The recipe's structure — a lined dish, a centred mound, two dressings, a green sprinkle — belongs to the older tradition of the composed salad, where appearance on the plate mattered as much as flavour and the cook was expected to build in layers rather than toss. Its appearance here is unsurprising: the Royal Baking Powder Company's cookbooks were promotional volumes that surrounded their leavened cakes and biscuits with a full complement of everyday household cookery, so that the book earned a permanent place on the shelf.