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Asparagus-and-Salmon Salad
Mix cold cooked salmon with mayonnaise, form in a mound and encircle with a wreath of cold cooked asparagus tips dressed with French dressing.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the whole effect depends on both elements being thoroughly cold and separately dressed. The original assumes you already have cooked salmon and cooked asparagus on hand.
- The hinge: dress them apartThe salmon takes mayonnaise, the asparagus takes French dressing, and the two should not be combined until the plate is assembled. Mayonnaise on hot or even warm asparagus will break and weep, and the mound will slump.
- Salmon quantityFor four servings, figure about 1 lb of cooked salmon (or two 6-7 oz tins, well drained) bound with roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup mayonnaise. Flake in large pieces and fold gently; overworking gives you paste. Canned salmon would have been an easy and likely option for a cook of this period, and still works, though poached fresh fillet holds its flake better.
- Asparagus timingPeriod cookbooks commonly boiled asparagus far longer than we would, often twenty minutes or more. Three to five minutes in salted water for medium spears, then straight into ice water, keeps the tips green and firm enough to stand in a ring. Drain and dry them well or the French dressing will slide off.
- French dressing, as this book means itNot the sweet orange bottled sauce. In 1900 it is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked at about three parts oil to one part vinegar and used immediately.
- Chilling and saltBoth components should be refrigerator-cold before assembly, and the salmon wants a check for salt after the mayonnaise goes in, since tinned fish varies widely in seasoning.
- AssemblyPack the dressed salmon into a small cup or ramekin and turn it out onto the plate for a clean dome, then lay the tips around it pointing outward. A few crisp lettuce leaves underneath keep the dressing from spreading across the plate.
- YieldThe original gives none. As written it makes one platter serving four as a first course, or two as a light lunch with bread and butter.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties (1899) came out of the Boston Cooking School world, and this entry shows how that school thought about salads: less a bowl of mixed things than a small piece of architecture, arranged on the plate and judged partly by how it looked. Canned salmon made the dish possible for ordinary households; it had become cheap and widely distributed by the 1890s, and it is often said to have been one of the few fish an inland American cook could rely on year-round. Asparagus, by contrast, was still strictly seasonal and faintly luxurious, which is why it is used here as a decorative wreath rather than as bulk. The pairing of a rich mayonnaise-bound center with a sharp vinaigrette-dressed border is a standard trick of the period, giving contrast without a separate sauce.