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Sardine Salad
Steep the requisite quantity of sardines in vinegar for half an hour, then scrape them carefully, refresh them in more vinegar, and arrange them round the edges of a dish. Chop fine a bunch of parsley, and three or four small onions, stone several olives, mix them with the onions, and place the entire mixture in the middle of the dish. Put the strained juice of two lemons in a basin with three tablespoonfuls of olive oil, and beat with a wooden spoon until of a smooth creamy consistency. Pour the sauce over the salad, and serve without delay.
A hors d'oeuvre salad from a book that assumes the cook can judge quantities. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need translating: what "scrape" means, and how sharp that dressing really is.
- Which sardinesAlmost certainly tinned sardines packed in oil, though the recipe does not say so; tins of the period generally held whole fish with skin and backbone intact. Drain them well before the vinegar steeping, or the oil will keep the vinegar off the fish.
- "Scrape" and "refresh"Scraping most likely means running a knife blade along the fish to lift off the loose silvery skin, and slipping out the backbone; refreshing is the quick second rinse in clean vinegar the recipe calls for, to wash away what the scraping loosened. With modern skinless, boneless fillets both steps can be reduced to a brief vinegar soak.
- Quantity"the requisite quantity" is the author's way of leaving it to you. Two standard tins, roughly 7 to 8 oz before draining, ringed around a dinner plate will serve four as a first course.
- Small onionsThe book does not say which. The phrase could mean young green onions or shallots, chopped fine so they season rather than dominate; some period writers use it for small button onions instead.
- The dressing is acid-heavyTwo lemons to three tablespoons of oil is roughly two parts acid to one part oil, the reverse of a modern vinaigrette. It suits fish already steeped in vinegar, but taste it first and add oil if you want it rounder.
- Beating to a creamLemon juice and oil will only hold together briefly with a wooden spoon. Whisk hard just before serving, or add a small spoonful of mustard if you want the emulsion to stay put.
- "Serve without delay"This is the hinge. The dressing separates within minutes. Assemble at the last moment.
- OlivesStoning means pitting. Green olives in brine are a plausible choice for a New York kitchen of the 1890s; chopping them coarsely lets them read as texture against the onion and parsley, though the recipe only says to stone them and mix them with the onions.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel and the compiler of this 1896 volume, filled his cold-dish chapters with the sort of small vinegar-sharp plates that opened a long menu. Sardine salad belongs to that family. Canned sardines had been a French industry since the early nineteenth century, centered on the Breton ports, and by the 1890s the tin was cheap, ubiquitous and respectable enough for a hotel dining room; American cookbooks of the decade are thick with sardines on toast, sardines in aspic and sardine canapes. The vinegar steeping and scraping here are a relic of the whole-fish tin, where the skin came away in grey flakes. What survives once you strip those steps away is a plain lemon-and-oil dressing over oily fish with onion, parsley and olive, which is essentially how sardines are still eaten around the Mediterranean.