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Sardine Salad
One box of sardines, lettuce, olives or radishes, mayonnaise dressing. Carefully remove the skin, heads and bones from one box of sardines. Keep the halves whole; arrange neatly in a bed of lettuce, garnish with stoned olives or radishes, cover with mayonnaise dressing. As this is a good Sunday night dish, the mayonnaise can be made on Saturday.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and almost entirely a matter of handling: the fish has to reach the plate in whole halves. A few of the terms have shifted since it was written.
- "One box of sardines"The flat tin, sold by weight rather than count. Period tins were commonly in the quarter-pound range, so a modern 3.75 oz tin is a reasonable stand-in, yielding roughly two to three salads as a light supper.
- Choose the fish for sizeLarger sardines in olive oil hold their shape when split and lifted; small brisling and sprats shred. Buy them packed in oil, not tomato or mustard sauce, which will fight the mayonnaise.
- Skin, head and boneMany tins today are already trimmed, and the backbone in the rest is soft enough to eat, so the work is often half done. Where you do need to bone them, lift the top fillet away with the flat of a knife, pull the spine out in one piece, and keep the two halves paired.
- Drain properlyBlot the halves on a cloth or paper before they go on the lettuce. Oil left clinging will thin the mayonnaise into a slick and wilt the leaves within minutes.
- "Stoned olives"Pitted olives. Halve them lengthwise so they sit flat as a garnish.
- The Saturday mayonnaiseSound advice, with one modern proviso: homemade mayonnaise is uncooked egg yolk, so keep it covered and refrigerated and use it within a couple of days. Anyone feeding the very young, the elderly or the immune-compromised should use a mayonnaise made with pasteurised egg.
- Assemble lateChill and dry the lettuce ahead, but build the plates just before serving. Sardines under mayonnaise go soft and the leaves collapse if the salad stands.
Sardine salad belongs to the era when the sealed tin first made oily fish an everyday larder staple rather than a coastal one; French canning of sardines dates from the early nineteenth century, at Nantes, with Portuguese canneries following considerably later. The book's aside about Sunday night is the real period detail: in households that kept a cook, Sunday supper is often said to have been the cold meal the family assembled itself, which is why so many salad collections of this vintage flag dishes that need no fire and a dressing made the day before. Salting and packing small fish in oil is much older than the tin, as the Mediterranean preserving trades attest; arranging halves on lettuce belongs to a later, more genteel style of service.