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Salmon Salad
Season large pieces of left-over salmon with vinegar, salt, and pepper. When ready to use, drain off liquid, place in center of platter on lettuce, and surround with any one or two, or all of the following vegetables: string-beans, asparagus tips, peas, beets, tomatoes (less of this than of the others).
Use lettuce leaves as a border. Serve with mayonnaise or French dressing (see pages 73-74).
A composed salad built from cooked salmon that has already been served once. The instructions assume you know how to make mayonnaise and how to cook and cool vegetables, so the useful detail is in handling and proportion.
- The hinge: brief marinationThe vinegar, salt and pepper are a short seasoning bath, not a cure. The recipe implies the fish sits until wanted, then is drained; a short spell in the cold is enough, and a very long one risks the salmon tasting pickled rather than fresh.
- Drain thoroughlyLiquid pooling under the fish will thin the mayonnaise into a slick on the platter. Lift the pieces out and blot them before arranging.
- What the salmon should beThe recipe says only "left-over salmon," presumably poached or baked from a previous meal. Cooked fish is best used within a few days refrigerated, and should have gone into the cold within about two hours of cooking. Canned salmon works but breaks into flakes rather than the "large pieces" the recipe wants.
- The vegetablesAll of them are meant to be cooked and cold except the tomatoes: string beans, asparagus tips and peas boiled until just tender then chilled, beets boiled or roasted and sliced. Keep the beets in a separate quarter of the platter or their juice will stain everything pink.
- Why less tomatoTomatoes weep, and their liquid dilutes dressing and softens lettuce. Seed them, and if you salt them, drain them for ten minutes first.
- DressingFrench dressing in a book of this period means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, the proportions varying by book, not a sweet orange bottled dressing. Serve either dressing at the table rather than tossing it through, since the salmon pieces are meant to stay whole.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about a pound of cooked salmon with three or four vegetables will fill a platter and serve four as a main course.
Left-over cookery was a genre in its own right in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a household roasted or poached a large piece of fish and was then obliged to account for it across several meals. Salmon suited the purpose because it holds together cold and because canning had made it cheap and widely available in the American pantry by the end of the century. The arrangement here, a mound of protein ringed with cold cooked vegetables and bordered with lettuce, is a standard composed salad of the period, of a piece with the mayonnaise-dressed fish salads that appear throughout Victorian service. The instruction to use less tomato than the other vegetables reflects a kitchen that thought of tomatoes as watery and assertive rather than as a salad staple.