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Fish Salad in Green Peppers
Cut lengthwise three or four green sweet peppers, remove the seeds and set away to chill. Discard all skin and bones from any cold boiled fish and pick apart into suitable sized pieces for salad. Season it with salt and pepper as needed, and sprinkle with a little lemon-juice. When ready to prepare the salad, mix the fish with enough mayonnaise (see page 74) or cold Hollandaise sauce (see page 72) to cover it well. Fill the peppers with this mixture, letting it fall in lightly, and garnish the top of each with a slice of hardcooked egg. This makes a good Saturday luncheon dish in warm weather.
A leftovers assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the whole thing rests on the condition of the fish and how cold everything stays.
- The fishAny firm cold cooked fish works — salmon, cod, haddock, halibut. Flake it in pieces large enough to hold their shape; shredded fish turns to paste once dressed. Use fish cooked no more than a day or two earlier, kept refrigerated the whole time, and discard anything with a sour or ammoniac smell.
- "Cold boiled fish"In period usage this meant fish poached in salted water or court bouillon, the standard treatment for a whole fish. Leftover baked or steamed fish substitutes without adjustment.
- Cold HollandaiseAn emulsion of egg yolk and butter; it firms up when chilled, which is presumably why it serves here as a salad dressing. Once cold it is difficult to rewarm or re-emulsify, and being yolk-based it should be kept refrigerated and used the same day. Mayonnaise is the more forgiving of the two options.
- Cutting the peppersSplit lengthwise gives two shallow boats per pepper; halve them through the stem end and trim the ribs flat so they sit level on the plate. Very large bell peppers may want quartering instead.
- Chilling"Set away to chill" means long enough to come thoroughly cold — the point of the dish is the cold, crisp shell against the soft filling. Dress and fill at the last moment; peppers weep and mayonnaise loosens if the salad stands.
- Filling lightlyThe instruction to let the mixture "fall in lightly" is deliberate. Packed down, the salad goes dense and greasy; heaped loosely it stays distinct.
- YieldThree or four peppers give six to eight halves, enough for three or four people as a luncheon course. The recipe gives no quantity of fish; judge by what will fill the shells lightly.
The "Saturday luncheon" note is the most informative line in the recipe. Fish on Friday was the ordinary rhythm of many American households, Catholic and otherwise, and a Friday boiled fish might well leave cold remains to be dealt with on Saturday. Stuffed raw peppers as a salad case belong to the same early twentieth-century vogue for serving cold food in edible containers, alongside tomato cups and scooped cucumber boats, which appear throughout the salad chapters of the period. Cold Hollandaise as an alternative to mayonnaise reflects a kitchen where both were made by hand from yolks and where a bowl of either might already be waiting in the icebox.