Salmon Salad
Set a can of salmon in a kettle of boiling water, let boil twenty minutes, take out of the can and put in a deep dish, pour off the juice or oil, put a few cloves in and around it, sprinkle salt and pepper over, cover with cold vinegar, and let it stand a day, take it from the vinegar and lay it on a platter. Prepare a dressing as follows: Beat the yolks of two raw eggs with the yolks of two eggs boiled hard and mashed fine as possible; add gradually a tablespoon mustard, three of melted butter, or the best of salad-oil, a little salt and pepper (either black or cayenne), and vinegar to taste. Beat the mixture a long time (some persons like the addition of lemon juice and a little brown sugar); cover the salmon thickly with a part of the dressing, tear up very small the crisp inside leaves of lettuce, put in the remainder of the mixture, and pour over with two or three larger pieces placed around the salmon, and serve.
A late-nineteenth-century canned-salmon salad, built on a hand-beaten dressing that sits halfway between mayonnaise and a cooked salad dressing. Two steps need rethinking before you start: the sealed can and the day-long marinade.
- Do not boil the sealed canModern cans are not made to be heated whole, and a sealed can in boiling water can swell or burst. The twenty-minute boil was there to firm and heat the fish; open the can, drain it, and use the salmon as it comes. It is already fully cooked.
- The vinegar day belongs in the fridgeSalmon standing a day under vinegar at room temperature was normal in a cool larder or cellar. Marinate it covered in the refrigerator instead, and count on 12-24 hours; the acid firms the flesh and cuts the canned flavour.
- ClovesWhole cloves. 'A few' is unspecified; four or five for a standard can is a reasonable reading. They act as aromatics for the marinade rather than as something to be eaten, so you may want to pick them out before dressing the fish.
- Raw yolks in the dressingThe two raw yolks are never cooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs in the shell or a carton of pasteurized yolks. The two hard-boiled yolks, mashed to a paste, help thicken and steady the dressing.
- Mustard means dry powderA tablespoon of prepared mustard would be mild; a tablespoon of dry English or Colman's-style powder, which is what a book of this date usually intends, is assertive. Start with two teaspoons and taste.
- Salad-oilNineteenth-century salad-oil usually means olive oil, though other oils were also sold under the name. Melted butter is the alternative the book itself offers, and it will set firm in the refrigerator, so dress a butter version shortly before serving.
- Beat the mixture a long timeThe hinge of the recipe. Mash the cooked yolks to a paste with the raw ones first, then add the oil or butter in a thin thread while beating hard. Adding it quickly gives you a broken, greasy dressing that will not coat the fish.
- YieldA standard 14-15 oz can of salmon dressed this way serves four as a lunch course, six as part of a larger cold table.
Canned salmon is the reason this recipe exists. Commercial canning on the Columbia and Sacramento rivers scaled up sharply after the 1860s, and by the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled the tin of salmon was one of the cheapest reliable proteins available to a household hundreds of miles from any coast -- which is why a Southern regional cookbook can print a fish salad at all. The dressing is equally of its moment: hard-boiled yolks mashed into raw ones was one common way to make an emulsion stable by hand, and the optional lemon juice and brown sugar point toward the sweet-sour boiled dressings that dominated American salads well into the twentieth century. The vinegar soak may be a holdover from an older habit of pickling fish for keeping, applied here to a product that no longer needed keeping, though that is a plausible reading rather than an established one.