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Sardine Mayonnaise
Skin and bone three sardines and pound them to a pulp; sift the cooked yolks of three eggs and add to the pulp; work until smooth, then add to one cup of mayonnaise dressing.
A compound mayonnaise in the classical French manner: a base sauce enriched with pounded fish and sieved yolk. It comes together in ten minutes and keeps a day or two, covered, in the refrigerator.
- The hinge is textureThe sardines and yolks must be worked to a completely smooth paste before any mayonnaise goes in. The original adds the paste to the mayonnaise; combining the two gradually rather than all at once helps, since a grainy paste is difficult to smooth out once the dressing is loose.
- Pounding without a mortarA small food processor or a bowl and the back of a fork both work. Skinning and boning is worth doing even with modern skinless-boneless tins, since a stray vertebra shows up immediately in a smooth dressing.
- Which sardinesThree sardines would have meant three whole fish from a tin packed in oil, perhaps an ounce or so of drained flesh. Drain them well; excess packing oil will thin the mayonnaise and can break it.
- "Sift" the yolksPress the hard-cooked yolks through a fine sieve rather than mashing them. Sieved yolk disperses into a paste; mashed yolk stays in lumps that hydrate unevenly.
- Three yolks is a lotTo one cup of mayonnaise, three cooked yolks give a thick, almost spreadable sauce. That suits it to stuffed eggs, canapés and as a binder for fish salad. For a pourable dressing over lettuce or cold salmon, slacken it with a little lemon juice or cream.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the mayonnaise is already seasoned and that the sardines bring salt. Taste before serving; lemon juice and a little cayenne or mustard sharpen a dressing that can otherwise read as flat and oily.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups, enough to dress a salad for six or to fill two dozen halved eggs.
- On the raw egg in the baseThe mayonnaise itself is uncooked. If it is being made from scratch for someone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
Sardine mayonnaise belongs to the family of compound mayonnaises that filled the salad-dressing chapters of American cookbooks around 1900 — green mayonnaise with pounded herbs, red with lobster coral or beetroot, and various fish and yolk versions like this one. The technique is straight out of the French professional kitchen, where a base sauce was flavoured and coloured to match whatever it dressed, but the ingredient is thoroughly of its moment: tinned sardines were cheap, shelf-stable and considered rather dainty. Cookbooks of this period treat the chafing dish and the cold salad as the two arenas where a hostess could show ingenuity without a professional cook, and a dressing that turned a tin of fish into something for canapés and stuffed eggs fitted that programme exactly. Sieved hard-cooked yolk is used here as both thickener and smoother, giving a cold sauce body.