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Fish Salad
1 pound haddock or other fish 1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped celery
2 tablespoons oil
Lettuce
1 tablespoon vinegar
Mayonnaise
Wrap the haddock in a clean cloth and boil it for ten minutes in salted water. The remains of almost any cold fish may be used in this way very satisfactorily, but the salad is more successful when made of fish that will flake nicely, such as salmon, cod, haddock, or halibut. Canned salmon will also make a very good salad. Remove the bones, pick the fish into fine bits while hot, turn over it oil mixed with vinegar and set away in a cold place. When about to serve, chop celery and add to the fish. Arrange crisp white leaves of lettuce in cup shapes on a platter, using one or two leaves for each, then lay one spoonful of the mixture in each cup and pour over it one spoonful of mayonnaise.
A straightforward composed salad whose success rests almost entirely on dressing the fish while it is still warm. The ingredient list as printed repeats the celery — one cup is what the method calls for.
- Dress it hotThe oil-and-vinegar step is the hinge. Warm flakes absorb the dressing; cold ones sit in it and taste bland, however much mayonnaise goes on top.
- Poaching timeTen minutes suits a thin fillet, not a thick piece. Reckon on roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at a bare simmer, and stop when the flesh just separates into flakes at the thickest point — about 145F.
- The clothWrapping a piece of fish in cheesecloth or muslin was a common way to lift it out of the water intact. A wide skimmer or a piece of parchment under the fish does the same job.
- Boiling"Boil" here means what we would call poach. A rolling boil shreds the fish and toughens the surface; keep the water at a shiver.
- Canned salmonStill a good option, and the recipe says so itself. Drain it well, remove the vertebrae and skin if you object to them, and go easy on added salt since canned fish is already salted.
- MayonnaiseThe mayonnaise of this period would have been made from scratch with raw yolk. Bought mayonnaise works; thin it with a teaspoon of the fish's vinegar dressing so it pours in a spoonful rather than sitting in a lump.
- YieldA pound of fish with a cup of celery fills six to eight lettuce cups as a first course, or serves three to four as a light lunch.
- TimingKeep the dressed fish no more than a day in the refrigerator, and add the celery only at the table — it weeps and goes limp once salted.
Fish salad of this kind belongs to the era when the icebox and the tin can between them made cold fish a dish worth serving in its own right, and the book — said to be a pattern company's household compendium of the Butterick sort, aimed at middle-class American housewives in the 1910s — hedges its bets by offering both fresh haddock and canned salmon. Canned Pacific salmon is generally said to have become cheap and ubiquitous in the United States by then, and it turns up constantly in period cookbooks in croquettes, loaves and salads exactly like this one. The lettuce leaf shaped into a cup was a common presentation for a mayonnaise-dressed salad of the period, from chicken to Waldorf.