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Fish Salad
Wrap in a fresh cloth one pound of solid fish (halibut preferred), 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 or haddock. Canned salmon will also make a very good salad. Remove the bones, pick the fish into fine bits while hot, turn over it two tablespoons of oil mixed with one tablespoon of vinegar or one-half tablespoon of lemon juice, and set away in a cold place. When about to serve, chop a head of white celery and stir it into 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 cold composed salad that hinges entirely on the texture of the fish: flakes, not shreds, and dressed while still warm so it absorbs the oil and acid.
- The cloth wrapWrapping the fish in cheesecloth keeps a poaching fillet in one piece and lets you lift it out without breaking it. A wide spatula or a poaching insert does the same job; if you use cloth, wet it first so it does not stick.
- Ten minutes is for a thick pieceA one-pound halibut steak an inch or more thick will take about that long; a thin fillet is done in four or five minutes. Do not let the water boil hard or the flesh tightens and weeps; a gentle simmer is enough.
- Dress it hotThe two tablespoons oil and one of vinegar (or half a tablespoon lemon juice) go on while the fish is still warm, because warm flakes absorb it and cold ones do not. This is the step that separates the dish from plain fish under mayonnaise.
- Canned salmonStill a reasonable shortcut, as the book says. Drain it well, lift out the skin and the soft round vertebrae if you object to them, and skip the poaching entirely; dress it and chill.
- A head of white celeryNineteenth-century celery was blanched pale and was milder and more tender than modern green stalks. Use the pale inner heart of a head, roughly four to six stalks, and chop it fine. Add it only at serving time or it waters the salad.
- The mayonnaiseThe book assumes homemade, which is a raw-egg emulsion. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and is safer for a dish that will sit out on a platter; either way keep the assembled salad cold until it goes to the table.
- YieldA pound of fish with celery fills six to eight lettuce cups as a first course, or serves three to four as a light lunch.
Fish salad of this kind belongs to the late-Victorian and Edwardian habit of turning yesterday's cooked fish into today's cold entree, and the recipe says so outright: "the remains of almost any cold fish may be used." Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the middle-class household, was writing for kitchens where cooked fish had to reappear in some presentable form. The lettuce-cup presentation was the fashionable dressing-up of the era, a way to serve a made-over dish as a course rather than a leftover, and canned salmon's appearance here is a marker of date: Pacific canneries had made it a cheap, reliable pantry staple by the closing decades of the nineteenth century.