Sardine Salad
Remove skin and bones from sardines, and mix with an equal quantity of the mashed yolks of "hard-boiled" eggs. Arrange in nests of lettuce leaves and serve with Mayonnaise Dressing.
Lobster Salad I Remove lobster meat from shell, cut in one-half inch cubes, and marinate with a French Dressing. Mix with a small quantity of Mayonnaise Dressing and arrange in nests of lettuce leaves. Put a spoonful of Mayonnaise on each, and sprinkle with lobster coral rubbed through a fine sieve. Garnish with small lobster claws around outside of dish. Cream Dressing I or II may be used in place of Mayonnaise Dressing.
Two separate salads have run together here, a common artifact of the original page layout: the sardine salad ends at "Mayonnaise Dressing," and Lobster Salad I begins after it. Both are assembly jobs, so the quality of the tinned fish or the shellfish is the whole dish.
- SardinesFannie Farmer's readers bought sardines packed in oil, skin and backbone intact, and were expected to lift both out. Modern skinless-boneless tins skip that step; if you use whole sardines, the fine bones are edible and can be mashed in, but the spine is worth pulling.
- The proportionEqual quantities of sardine and mashed hard-cooked yolk. The recipe does not say whether by volume or by weight, and either reading is possible; taste as you go, since several yolks will be needed to balance a standard tin. The mixture should be a coarse paste, not smooth.
- Don't waste the whitesThe recipe uses yolks only. Chop the whites finely and scatter them over the finished nests, or the eggs are half thrown away.
- MayonnaiseThe dressing is a separate recipe in this book and is raw-egg mayonnaise. If you are making it from scratch for anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, or use a commercial mayonnaise.
- Lobster quantityNo amount is given. A 1.5 lb lobster yields roughly 1 to 1.25 cups of picked meat, which is about two servings arranged this way; a second lobster doubles that and supplies more of the small legs and claws for the garnish.
- MarinatingFifteen to twenty minutes in French dressing is plenty. Longer and the acid firms the lobster's surface and makes it chalky, and the meat sheds water into the mayonnaise you add next.
- CoralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark greenish-black when raw and bright red when cooked. Only some lobsters have it, so the garnish is optional. Push it through a sieve while still warm and it powders instead of clumping.
- Cream DressingThe alternatives cross-referenced at the end are the book's separate cooked dressings, enriched with cream rather than whipped cream. They are sweetened, so they read milder and less sharp than mayonnaise.
- Lettuce nestsUse the cupped inner leaves of iceberg or Boston lettuce, chilled and thoroughly dry. A wet leaf slackens mayonnaise into a puddle within minutes.
Both salads belong to the era when the cold composed salad, served in a lettuice cup with a spoonful of mayonnaise, was the height of American genteel dining, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) devotes pages to variations on the pattern. The sardine version is the thrifty end of the range: tinned sardines were cheap, shelf-stable and widely available in New England by the 1890s, and pairing them with egg yolk turned a few cents of fish into something that could be sent to table looking composed. Lobster sat at the other end, though not as far as one might assume: lobster had been a poor man's food along the Massachusetts coast within living memory, and its rise to luxury status came with the canning trade and the railroads that carried it inland. The insistence on saving the coral and ringing the dish with the small claws is pure period presentation, garnishing the shellfish with evidence of itself.