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Sardine Salad
Lay the sardines upon soft paper, that they may be freed from oil. Scrape off the skin and remove the bones; squeeze over them a little lemon juice.
Arrange upon a bed of crisp lettuce leaves, or upon shredded lettuce, and dress with either French or mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs cut in slices.
A late-Victorian composed salad that depends entirely on the quality of the fish and the crispness of the greens. Nothing here is difficult; the only real work is boning the sardines without reducing them to paste.
- The hinge: degrease, then handle gentlyBlotting the packing oil is what keeps the dressing from breaking into a slick on the plate. Lift the fish with a small offset spatula or two forks rather than fingers, or they will shred as you skin them.
- Sardines then and nowPeriod sardines were generally small pilchards or sprats (brisling) packed whole in oil, skin and backbone intact, which is why the recipe tells you to scrape and bone them. Some tins today are sold skinless and boneless; if yours are, skip that step and simply drain and blot.
- Oil-packed, not water-packedChoose fish packed in olive oil. Water-packed sardines are drier and flatter in flavor, and the lemon has nothing to soften.
- LemonA little means a little; a teaspoon or so per tin is enough. The fish are already salty and the dressing brings more acid, so the lemon is there to cut the oil, not to marinate.
- Which dressingFrench dressing of this period generally means a simple vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, with proportions varying from roughly equal parts to three parts oil to one of vinegar; it is the lighter choice with oily fish. Mayonnaise makes the salad a good deal richer and suits a luncheon course better than a first course.
- The lettuceCrisp means crisp: romaine hearts or iceberg, washed, dried thoroughly and chilled. Dress the greens at the last moment or the leaves will slump under the oil.
- Hard-boiled eggsSlice them with a wet knife or an egg slicer and lay them around the edge, not over the fish, so the yolks stay intact. Eggs cooked about ten minutes and cooled in ice water slice cleanly and avoid the gray ring.
- YieldOne standard tin (about 3.75 oz) serves one as a light main salad or two as a first course. Figure a tin per person for luncheon.
Tinned sardines were among the first industrially preserved foods to become genuinely cheap and ubiquitous, and by the 1890s a tin is often said to have been a pantry staple in American households hat on the shelf tf reliable protein that kept well and needed no cooking. That is exactly why the fish turns up so often in books of this kind: the salad-and-chafing-dish literature of the turn of the century was written for hostesses improvising a light luncheon or a late supper after the theater, where the whole point was a handsome dish assembled from the shelf in minutes. The construction here tf a bed of lettuce, a dressed protein, a rim of sliced hard-boiled egg tf is the standard American composed-salad grammar of the period, applied in turn to salmon, lobster, chicken and shrimp throughout these books. The instruction to blot the oil on soft paper suggests a concern with how the dressed fish would look and taste on the plate.