Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Salmon Salad
Salmon Salad
Remove the skin and bones from two salmon steaks that have been broiled; flake the flesh with two forks, put it into a basin. season it with pepper and salt, and moisten with lemon juice or vinegar, and a very little oil, the fish being oily itself. Soak it for an hour or so. Wash a head of lettuce in plenty of water, drain it well, pull the leaves apart, and put them in a salad-bowl; drain the salmon, put it in with the lettuce, pour over it a mayonnaise dressing, garnish it tastefully with slices of hard boiled eggs, olives and anchovies, cut it into small fancy shapes, and serve.
A leftover dish dressed up for a hotel table: cooked salmon marinated briefly, then composed on lettuce under mayonnaise. Most of the work is in the seasoning and the arrangement.
- Scale and yieldTwo broiled salmon steaks give perhaps 8-12 oz of cooked flesh once skin and bone are out, enough for two or three as a first course depending on the size of the steaks. The recipe assumes the fish is already cooked, so it is a use for last night's salmon rather than a reason to buy new.
- "Basin"Simply a mixing bowl. Use glass or stainless; the lemon juice or vinegar will pick up a metallic edge from aluminium or unlined copper over an hour.
- The soak is a marinade, not a soakAn hour in acid, oil and seasoning is what gives this salad its flavour, since the mayonnaise goes on at the last minute and never penetrates. Refrigerate during that hour rather than leaving it at room temperature, and drain the fish properly before it meets the lettuce or the dressing will slide off.
- Go light on the oilOscar's parenthetical is the point: farmed salmon is fattier than most of what he would have worked with, so a teaspoon or two is plenty. Too much and the flakes turn greasy under mayonnaise, which is itself mostly oil.
- Salt twice, taste onceAnchovies and olives are both cured, and the mayonnaise carries salt as well. Season the fish lightly at the marinating stage and correct at the end.
- "Cut it into small fancy shapes""Cut it into small fancy shapes" most likely applies to the garnish rather than the salad, though the original is ambiguous. Egg white, olives and anchovy fillets were often stamped into rings, diamonds or crescents with small cutters before being laid over the top.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise of this period was made in the kitchen with raw yolks. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is the sensible substitute; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the finished salad cold.
- Assemble at the table's edgeDressed lettuce collapses within minutes. Have the leaves chilled and dry, the fish drained and the garnishes cut, then bring the three together immediately before serving.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maître d'hôtel in 1893 and put his name to a cookbook of some nine hundred pages in 1896; it reads less like a chef's manual than a record of what a large American hotel kitchen actually turned out day after day, thrift included. Salmon salad belongs to the frugal end of that repertoire — cold cooked fish, an acid marinade, lettuce and mayonnaise — a formula applied in the same era to lobster, chicken and, most famously in this house, apples and celery. Tinned salmon was widely available by the 1890s, Columbia River canning having begun in the late 1860s and expanded through the 1870s and 1880s. What marks it as Oscar's is the finish: the cut garnishes of egg, olive and anchovy are the hotel's contribution, turning a plate of leftovers into something a waiter could carry into a room.