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Sardine Salad
¾ cup sardines
Lettuce leaves
¾ cup hard-cooked egg
Mayonnaise or French dressing
I cucumber
Remove the skin and bones from sardines and mix with chopped hard-cooked eggs. Cut cucumber in thin slices and arrange on lettuce leaves. Add sardine and egg mixture. Serve with mayonnaise or French dressing.
A straightforward composed salad; the only real work is boning the fish and keeping the cucumber from watering down the dressing.
- QuantitiesThree-quarters of a cup of drained sardines is roughly two standard 3.75-oz tins. Three-quarters of a cup of chopped hard-cooked egg is about three large eggs.
- Skin and bonesModern tinned sardines are usually already skinless and boneless, or the bones are soft enough to eat and add calcium. If using whole brisling or larger pilchards, lift the backbone out with the tip of a knife rather than mashing it in.
- Oil or water packOil-packed sardines want thorough draining and a blot on paper towel, or the dressing will slide off the lettuce. Water- or tomato-packed tins work but give a looser, wetter mixture.
- CucumberSalt the slices lightly and drain them ten minutes, then pat dry. Period recipes often specified peeling; a thin-skinned English cucumber needs no peeling.
- Handling the fishFold the sardines into the egg rather than stirring — the point is visible flakes, not a paste. Overmixing turns the whole thing into sandwich filling.
- Dressing choiceFrench dressing (oil and vinegar in period usage, not a sweet orange bottled dressing) suits the oil-packed fish better; mayonnaise makes a richer, heavier plate.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly four as a first course or two as a light lunch. Assemble it just before serving; the cucumber weeps and the lettuce wilts soon after dressing.
Tinned sardines were among the early convenience proteins to reach the ordinary American pantry, and by the 1910s and 1920s cookbooks treated them as a staple of the cold supper table alongside potted meats and tinned salmon. This recipe belongs to a whole genre of period "salads" that were really arrangements: a bed of lettuce, something from a tin, chopped egg, and a spoonful of dressing, requiring no cooking beyond boiling the eggs. Butterick was a pattern and magazine publisher whose household books were aimed at a middle-class domestic readership, and dishes like this one earned their place by being assembled in minutes from shelf-stable goods. The distinction the recipe draws between mayonnaise and "French dressing" was common in American cookbooks of the period, where the latter meant simply oil, vinegar and seasoning shaken together.