Salmon Salad
French and mayonnaise dressing, salmon, celery, tarragon leaves, lobster coral, hard-boiled eggs.
Cook slices of salmon; when cold separate the flesh in flakes. Cut some celery quite fine, place it in a salad bowl with the salmon over it; pour evenly over this a French dressing, then a mayonnaise. Decorate the top with tarragon leaves, lobster coral and quartered hard-boiled eggs. Normandy Salad. (Mrs. Lincoln.) One pint French peas, one pint English walnuts, one-half head lettuce, four nasturtiums, mayonnaise dressing.
Use the small French peas that come in the glass jars. Pour them into a colander, rinse in cold water, drain and dry on a towel. Fresh peas will, of course, be preferred in their season and should be cooked, drained and chilled. Blanch the walnuts by letting them remain in boiling water a few minutes, then cut them into bits the size of the peas. Sprinkle them with salt, and mix the peas and nuts together with enough mayonnaise to moisten and hold them together. Arrange it on lettuce leaves with bright yellow nasturtiums here and there between the leaves. Cover the nuts and peas with mayonnaise.
Two salads run together on the page: a flaked salmon salad dressed twice, and Mrs. Lincoln's Normandy Salad of peas and walnuts. Both are assembly jobs, and both depend on everything being thoroughly cold before it is dressed.
- The double dressing is the pointFrench dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper) goes on first so the salmon and celery take up the acid, then mayonnaise sits on top as a coating. The recipe gives no timing, but add the mayonnaise shortly before serving or it slackens and slides.
- Cooking the salmon"Cook slices of salmon" means poaching steaks in barely simmering salted water or court-bouillon until just opaque, roughly 8-10 minutes for a 1-inch steak, then cooling completely before flaking. Restaurant practice often pulls salmon at 125-130F, though US food-safety guidance for fish is 145F; the period habit of cooking it firm is what makes flaking easy but the flesh dry.
- Lobster coralThe roe of a female lobster, dark greenish-black when raw and coral-red once cooked, pressed through a sieve and used as a garnish. It is rarely sold on its own; in practice you get it by buying a hen lobster. Sieved hard-boiled egg yolk, or a little paprika dusted over the mayonnaise, gives a similar visual effect.
- Tarragon leavesWhole fresh leaves laid on as decoration, not chopped herb. Use only fresh French tarragon; dried is useless here and Russian tarragon has almost no flavour.
- "One pint French peas" in glass jarsPetits pois, the small tender sort, then sold bottled. A 1-pint measure is about 2 cups drained, roughly 9-10 oz of frozen petits pois, cooked briefly and chilled; jar sizes vary, so measure rather than counting jars.
- Blanching walnutsBoiling water for a few minutes loosens the papery skin, which is where the bitterness sits; rub the halves in a towel and pick off the skin before chopping. A pint of shelled walnuts is about 4 oz by weight per cup, so roughly 8 oz.
- NasturtiumsFlowers and leaves are edible and peppery, but only from plants you know have not been sprayed. Florist flowers are not food.
- YieldThe salmon salad serves four to six as a first course depending on how much fish you poach; the Normandy salad, with a pint each of peas and nuts, serves six.
Both salads belong to the elaborate cold-table cookery of the 1890s and 1900s, when a salad was as much a piece of decoration as a dish, built up in layers and finished with contrasting colour: red coral, yellow egg, green tarragon. The attribution to "Mrs. Lincoln" is Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln, first principal of the Boston Cooking School and author of the 1884 Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book, whose name carried enough authority in American kitchens that other compilers cited her recipes by name. The instruction to use bottled French peas is a small record of the period's grocery shelf: imported petits pois in glass were a luxury import worth specifying. Lobster coral as a garnish reflects an era when the cook thought first of what a dish would look like on the table.