No. 2631

Fish Salads

Salades de Poissons

These consist principally of perch, trout, turbot and salmon. For these salads the fish must be boiled or cooked in a court-bouillon (No. 38) beforehand, so that they are cold when needed for use. They can also be made of sauted fillets of fish; in either case the skin and bones must first be removed. Put the fish into a bowl and season it with salt, oil and vinegar; it is generally arranged shaped as a pyramid on a cold dish, alternating and upholding the pieces of fish with a mixed cooked vegetable salad (No. 2650) cut in quarter-inch dice or balls five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter. When the salad is dressed, smooth the surface, and cover it with a layer of mayonnaise with jelly (No. 613), then let it get firm for half an hour in a cold place, decorating it afterward with pieces of pickled cucumber and truffles. Surround the base with halved hard-boiled eggs, standing upright one against the other after cutting off a quarter of their length on the round end, so as to enable them to stand erect against the salad. A row of small lettuce hearts cut in four, and simply salted, may be arranged above the eggs, and also fasten a lozenged cut of very red and thin beetroot over the cut end of the egg, on top of the yolks (Fig. 492). Instead of an egg border, one of jelly may be substituted, decorated with shrimp tails, hard boiled eggs, crawfish and stoned olives.

← No. 2630 Crawfish Salad with Jelly Cooked Salads No. 2632 Frog Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is describing a moulded buffet salad rather than a tossed one: cold cooked fish bound with dressing, built into a pyramid, sealed under jellied mayonnaise and decorated. The construction is the recipe; the seasoning is almost an afterthought.

The hinge: mayonnaise with jellyNo. 613 is mayonnaise collée — mayonnaise slackened with warm liquid aspic and used before it sets. It must be fluid enough to coat in one pass but on the point of setting, or it runs off the pyramid. Work over ice, test on a cold spoon, and pour in a single sweep; a second coat over a half-set first coat leaves visible seams.
Court-bouillonRanhofer's No. 38 is his aromatic poaching liquid: water acidulated with wine or vinegar, with aromatic vegetables and herbs, simmered before the fish goes in. Bring it barely to a shiver, never a rolling boil, and let the fish cool in the liquid so it stays moist.
Choice of fishPerch and trout are straightforward. Turbot is expensive and often unavailable; halibut or brill behave the same way. Salmon is the easiest to work with here because it holds in large firm flakes that will stack without collapsing.
The vegetable saladNo. 2650 is a mixed cooked vegetable salad of the macédoine type, dressed with oil and vinegar. Cook each vegetable separately to just tender and drain them thoroughly; wet vegetables will thin the dressing and slump the pyramid.
Dice and ball sizesA quarter inch is about 6 mm; five-sixteenths is about 8 mm. Uniformity matters more than the exact figure.
TrufflesFresh black truffle for decoration is a considerable expense for what is essentially a stencil. Preserved truffle peelings, or thin rounds of black olive, give the same graphic effect at a fraction of the cost.
Setting time and holdingHalf an hour assumed a genuinely cold larder. Give it an hour in the refrigerator. Cooked fish and mayonnaise in aspic should not sit out on a buffet more than two hours; build it cold, hold it cold, and serve it cold.
YieldRanhofer gives none. Reckon on 1 1/2 lb of cooked, skinned and boned fish with about a pound of dressed vegetables for eight as a first course, with six to eight hard-boiled eggs for the border.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs squarely to the world of the grand cold buffet. The technique of coating a moulded dish in mayonnaise collée and then setting decorative cutouts of truffle, beetroot and pickled cucumber into the still-tacky surface was standard nineteenth-century garde-manger practice, generally traced to the elaborate cold work of Carême and formalised through the professional kitchens that followed him. The reference to Fig. 492 is a reminder that the book was written for cooks who would be judged on how the dish looked from across a dining room: the fish itself is barely seasoned — salt, oil, vinegar, one line — while the architecture of eggs, lettuce hearts and beetroot lozenges takes up most of the entry. Salmon and turbot handled this way appeared on the cold side of banquet menus throughout the period, where they could be built hours ahead and would hold their shape.