Salmon Salad
One can of salmon, 4 boiled potatoes, 2 dill pickles, chopped fine, a few nice olives chipped from pits, a small quantity of celery, an onion if desired, 6 hard boiled eggs, season to taste. Use any good mayonnaise dressing. Put eggs in last and let stand for a few hours before serving.
POR
A community-cookbook salad built on the two cheap staples of the period pantry: canned salmon and boiled potatoes. It needs almost no translation, but a few points make the difference between a good version and a soggy one.
- The canPeriod canned salmon was packed with skin and bones, both of which soften completely and were meant to be mashed in. A modern 14-15 oz can of pink or red salmon works the same way; if you use skinless boneless fillets in a pouch you will lose some of the richness and should add a little more mayonnaise.
- PotatoesFour boiled potatoes means medium potatoes, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb; the recipe does not say which sort, though a waxy potato holds its dice best. Boil them whole in their skins, peel while warm, and dice once cooled — potatoes cut before boiling absorb water and turn the salad pasty.
- "Chipped from pits"Unpitted olives were still common, and the phrase suggests cutting the flesh away from the stone in chips. Whole brined olives, sliced, suit the recipe better than canned ripe black olives, which are far milder — though the recipe does not say which sort it means.
- DressingHomemade mayonnaise was often thinner and sharper than modern jarred mayonnaise. If using a commercial brand, loosen it with a spoonful of the pickle brine or a little lemon juice; the recipe gives no quantity for the dressing.
- The eggs lastThis is the one instruction that matters. Six hard-boiled eggs folded in at the end, coarsely chopped, stay visible as eggs; stirred in early with everything else they break down and the whole bowl goes uniformly yellow-grey.
- "Let stand for a few hours"Meant as a flavour-melding rest, which at the time would have happened in a cool cellar or on ice. Do the resting covered in the refrigerator, not on the counter — a salad of cooked potato, egg and fish held at room temperature for hours is exactly the combination that causes trouble.
- SeasoningSeason after mixing, not before. Between the brined salmon, the pickles and the olives there is a great deal of salt already; you are usually adding pepper and perhaps a little more acid rather than salt.
- YieldRoughly six to eight as a main-dish salad, more if mounded on lettuce as a first course. The recipe itself gives no yield and no serving suggestion.
- PORThe initials at the end are presumably the contributor's, a common practice in community and subscription cookbooks assembled from local households.
Salmon salad of this kind belongs to the age of the tin. Commercial salmon canning on the Columbia River and in Alaska expanded enormously through the last decades of the nineteenth century, and a can of salmon became one of the cheapest sources of protein available to an inland household, shipped by rail to towns that had never seen a fresh fish. The construction here — flaked protein stretched with boiled potato, sharpened with pickle and olive, bound with mayonnaise and set to stand — follows the standard American "made salad" template of the period, the same one that produced chicken salad and veal salad. Mayonnaise-type dressings, homemade and increasingly commercial, were becoming ordinary in home kitchens in this era, which is why the recipe can say "any good mayonnaise dressing" and assume the reader has one to hand.