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Sardine Salad, No. 2
Arrange a pint of cold cooked fish, flaked, on a bed of lettuce leaves and cover with sardine dressing. Carefully split six selected sardines; remove the bones and arrange the halves on the top of the salad, with the heads at the centre. Garnish with slices of lemon.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, and it assumes you already have the sardine dressing from earlier in the same chapter and a bowl of leftover boiled fish in the cold room. Both need translating.
- Sardine dressingThe book gives this separately earlier in the chapter; such dressings are typically mayonnaise worked with mashed boneless sardines, lemon juice and a little cayenne or mustard. Check the book's own version if you have it; otherwise mash three or four drained sardines to a paste and beat them into about a cup of mayonnaise with a good squeeze of lemon.
- A pint of flaked fishMeasured by volume, loosely packed: roughly 12 oz to 1 lb of cooked fish off the bone. Cold poached halibut, cod, haddock or salmon all suit; canned salmon works if drained hard and picked over.
- "Selected" sardinesOn tins of the period this generally indicated the better, larger and more uniform fish, sold whole with heads on, though the term was not tightly defined. Most tins today are headless and pre-cleaned, so the decorative spoke of heads at the centre is no longer available; arrange the split fillets as a wheel and put a lemon wedge or an olive at the hub.
- Splitting and boningSlide a thumbnail or the tip of a paring knife along the belly, open the fish flat, and lift the spine out from the head end in one piece. Do it on a plate rather than in the tin so the fillets stay intact, and drain them on paper first or the oil will slacken the dressing.
- Cold cooked fishThe salad is only as good as the fish is cold and firm. Poach it a day ahead, chill it thoroughly, and flake in large pieces rather than shredding, or the dressing turns the whole thing to paste.
- YieldSix sardines and a pint of fish serve four as a first course, two as lunch. Dress it no more than half an hour before serving; lettuce leaves under a wet dressing collapse quickly.
Sardine salads of this kind belong to the brief period when tinned fish was both cheap and slightly glamorous. French sardines were the dominant early import, while Norwegian brisling became a mass American grocery item largely in the early twentieth century; the main reason tinned sardines became cheap in the United States was domestic Maine canning, which began in the mid-1870s. The recipe's logic is thrift dressed as elegance: the bulk is yesterday's boiled fish, invisible under the dressing, while the six "selected" sardines laid out in a spoke with their heads meeting at the centre do the work of the garnish. That arrangement, along with the ring of lemon slices, reflects the strongly geometric plating taught in the cooking-school books of the era, where a salad was judged as much on its pattern as its flavour.