Home › Salads › Cucumber and Sardine Salad
Cucumber and Sardine Salad
2 Fish Lettuce Sliced Cucumbers Mayonnaise Place sliced cucumbers on the lettuce leaves, on this the fish, and cover with the mayonnaise. One person.
Drain liquor from tomatoes, soak gel- CHICKEN SALAD atine one-half hour in cup of cold water.
Put tomato liquor into a sauce pan with the bay leaf, onion juice and sprig of parsley, seasoning with the salt and pepper. Bring to a boil; simmer twenty minutes. Stir in the gelatine, add the sugar. As soon as dissolved strain through a flannel jelly bag. Pour into wet melon or border mold; set in a cold place to form. When stiff turn out on platter, garnish with lettuce leaves and pour mayonnaise over it.
A plate salad of three components, assembled cold. The only real decisions are the state of the cucumber and the quality of the tinned fish.
- "2 Fish"The recipe says only "Fish"; the title supplies the sardines. Read as two fish rather than two tins. Oil-packed fish, drained and blotted, sits best on cucumber; heavier tomato-packed fish will bleed into the mayonnaise.
- YieldThe original says "one person," so scale up plate by plate rather than tossing everything in a bowl. Two sardines, three or four cucumber slices and a spoonful of mayonnaise per serving.
- CucumberMany books of the era peel and salt cucumbers before serving. A modern English or Persian cucumber needs neither; slice thin, about an eighth of an inch, shortly before serving so it does not weep.
- Draining the fishSardines carry a surprising amount of oil that will thin the mayonnaise into a slick on the plate. Lay them on paper for a minute first.
- MayonnaiseIn this period it would have been beaten by hand from raw yolk and oil. Bottled mayonnaise works, though it is sweeter and softer; loosen it with a little lemon juice so it coats rather than sits in a lump.
- Assembly orderLettuce, then cucumber, then fish, then mayonnaise over the top -- the dressing is a mask, not a toss. Keep the lettuce leaf whole and cupped so it holds the slices in place.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed, and the dish needs both, plus lemon. Sardines are salty but cucumber is not, and the salad tastes flat without acid.
Sardine salads turn up frequently in American cookbooks between about 1890 and 1920, for the plain reason that canned sardines were among the cheapest and most reliable proteins a household could keep on a shelf: tinned fish required no marketing, no butcher and no judgment about freshness, and it produced a composed salad that looked like restaurant work. The style of service here -- an individual portion built on a lettuce leaf and masked with mayonnaise -- is a standard American salad-course format of the period, as opposed to the bowl salads that came later. Older books often direct that cucumber slices be soaked in salted ice water before serving, a step this recipe omits.