Salmon Salad
Flake remnants of cold boiled salmon. Mix with French Mayonnaise, or Cream Dressing. Arrange on nests of lettuce leaves. Garnish with the yolk of a "hard-boiled" egg forced through a potato ricer, and white of egg cut in strips.
A leftovers dish rather than a formal recipe, and it assumes you have poached a whole salmon earlier in the week. The proportions are left entirely to the cook.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. As a rough guide, allow a couple of generous handfuls of flaked cooked salmon and 2 to 3 tablespoons of dressing per person; about two cups of flaked fish with half a cup of dressing will do for four as a first course.
- "Remnants of cold boiled salmon"Cold salmon flakes more cleanly than warm; fish cooked specially for this is easier to handle if chilled first. Pick out skin, the grey line of fat under it, and any pin bones.
- French Mayonnaise vs. Cream DressingBoth are dressings given elsewhere in the book: the mayonnaise is the oil-and-egg emulsion, while cream dressings of the period were generally lighter, cream- or milk-based and sharpened with vinegar. Either works; plain jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream and lemon juice is the practical stand-in.
- Fold, do not stirDress the fish shortly before serving and turn it over gently rather than stirring; flakes left sitting in dressing tend to soften and shed liquid.
- The riced yolkA potato ricer gives the fine yellow mimosa crumb the garnish depends on. A box grater's coarse side or a fine sieve does the same job; press the yolk while it is cool, not warm.
- "Nests of lettuce leaves"Cupped inner leaves of butter or Boston lettuce, washed and thoroughly dried. Wet leaves dilute the dressing and the salad slides.
- SeasoningThe original leaves it out entirely. Cooked salmon needs salt, pepper, and lemon; a little chopped celery or cucumber adds the crunch the dish otherwise lacks.
Salmon salad belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American habit of turning yesterday's boiled fish into today's cold luncheon dish, and its place among the salads says as much about household economy as about taste. Commercially canned Pacific salmon was cheap and widely available in American pantries by the 1880s and 1890s, and versions of this salad made with tinned fish appear in community cookbooks. Sieved egg yolk used as a garnish is called mimosa in French kitchens for its resemblance to the blossom.