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Salmon Salad
(For evening company, or fish course at a Hard-boiled eggs. dinner party.) INGREDIENTS.
1 teaspoonful of gelatine, softened in one tablespoonful of cold water.
1 pint of string beans or asparagus tips.
1 pint of cooked peas.
French dressing. 2 slices of salmon, 2 inches thick.
Jelly mayonnaise, or fancy
The text as printed is a fragment: an ingredient list with the method lost, and a stray line about hard-boiled eggs that has drifted up from the heading. What it describes is a composed cold plate of poached salmon, dressed vegetables and a set mayonnaise, and it can be reconstructed with confidence from the ingredients alone.
- The hinge: jelly mayonnaiseThe single teaspoon of gelatine softened in a tablespoon of cold water is most likely meant for the mayonnaise rather than the salad, since "jelly mayonnaise" is listed and the method is missing. Softened, dissolved over hot water, cooled to barely tepid and whisked into mayonnaise, it lets the sauce be spooned over the fish and hold a coat instead of sliding off. Too hot and the mayonnaise is liable to break; too cool and the gelatine can set in threads.
- "2 slices of salmon, 2 inches thick"These would be cross-cut steaks from a whole fish, perhaps three-quarters of a pound to a pound each. Poach them gently in salted water with a little vinegar or wine, let them cool in the liquid, then lift out the skin and centre bone before coating. Many modern cooks take salmon off the heat at 125-130F internal, below the 145F usually recommended for fish; cooking until it flakes freely gives drier fish under the sauce.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, usually somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked and used at once. Printed versions of the period sometimes add mustard or paprika, but it is nothing to do with the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name. The beans, asparagus and peas would be dressed in it, plausibly while still warm, and drained before plating.
- A pint of vegetables, measured cookedA pint here is 2 cups by volume of the cooked, drained vegetable, not a weight. Reckon on about 12 oz of trimmed string beans or a good bunch of asparagus, and either fresh shelled peas or frozen ones, which are closer to the intended sweetness than canned.
- The hard-boiled eggsThe stray line most likely belongs to a garnish that the fragment loses. Two or three eggs, quartered or with the yolks sieved over the top, are a common finish on cold salmon of this period, sometimes with capers or a few olives.
- Assembly and chillingBed the dressed vegetables on a platter, set the coated salmon on top, garnish, and chill until the mayonnaise is firm, about an hour. It is a make-ahead dish, but a cold mayonnaise-coated fish should not sit out longer than two hours at the table.
- YieldTwo steaks of that size plus a quart of vegetables will serve six as a fish course, or four as the main dish of a supper.
This has the look of the American salad books that followed the Boston Cooking School's rise in the 1890s, though nothing in the fragment ties it to a particular title, when a cold composed salad was the standard centrepiece for evening company and for the fish course at a dinner served in courses rather than all at once. Jellied and coated dishes were the mark of an ambitious hostess in that period: leaf gelatine and then granulated gelatine had become reliable and cheap enough for domestic use, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are full of chaud-froid sauces, aspic-glazed salmon and moulded mayonnaise borrowed from professional French kitchens and cut down to a household scale. The parenthetical note at the head of the recipe is the giveaway that this is a display dish rather than a family one: it names its two social occasions before it names a single ingredient.