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Sardine-and-Egg Salad
Skin and bone a dozen sardines and put them in a mortar; remove the shells from an equal number of hard-boiled eggs and cut them into halves crosswise, so as to form cups with pointed edges; put the yolks into the mortar with the sardines, add a tablespoonful, or less, of chopped parsley, a dash of pepper and salt, and work to a smooth paste; moisten with salad dressing and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cut a thin slice from the ends of the egg cups, that they may be set upright on the serving-dish, and fill with the mixture, making it round on the top like a whole yolk. Arrange these on a bed of watercress, or shredded lettuce, and sprinkle plentifully with French dressing.
A stuffed-egg recipe of the deviled-egg family, scaled for a party. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the two different dressings and the fact that canned sardines are much saltier than the filling suggests.
- Two dressings, not one"Salad dressing" in cookery of this period generally meant a thick boiled dressing or mayonnaise, used here to bind the filling. "French dressing" is the plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper poured over the greens at the end. Substituting one for the other gives you either a dry paste or a soggy bed.
- Salt last, and taste firstOil-packed sardines carry a good deal of salt, and the recipe tells you to season twice. Mash and bind before adding any salt at all, then correct.
- The mortarA food processor overworks the fish into a gummy emulsion. A fork in a bowl, or a few pulses at most, keeps the texture; the yolks do the smoothing work.
- SardinesA dozen means a dozen small whole fish, which depending on size is two to three standard 3.75 oz tins. Drain them well and blot, or the oil will loosen the filling past the point where it will mound.
- The pointed edgesThe "cups with pointed edges" most likely come from cutting the egg crosswise in a zigzag rather than a straight line. Score the shelled egg all round with small angled cuts before pulling the halves apart.
- MoundingPiling the filling "round on the top like a whole yolk" is easiest with a piping bag fitted with a plain tip, or two teaspoons. The intended effect is a mound that reads as a whole yolk sitting in the white cup.
- YieldTwelve eggs give twenty-four filled halves, enough for eight to twelve as a first course. Fill no more than a couple of hours ahead, keep cold, and dress the greens only as it goes to the table.
This comes from Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899), a book written squarely for the fashionable light supper of the period, when chafing dishes and cold composed salads were the entertaining of choice for people without a large kitchen staff. Canned sardines made that possible: by the 1890s tinned fish from Brittany and from the Maine canneries around Eastport was cheap, shelf-stable and considered slightly smart, and it turns up all through American cookery of the era in sandwiches, canapes and salads. The stuffed egg itself is much older than the tin, deviled or stuffed eggs being a standing item in English and American cookbooks well before this one; what dates this version is the pairing of a boiled or mayonnaise dressing inside with a plain French dressing outside, a distinction Hill's readers would have taken for granted and modern ones mostly do not.